The Ministry of Education announced on Tuesday the initiation of a rapid investigation regarding allegations by a number of parents that a security officer sexually assaulted five children at one of Nasr City's international schools.
Nasr City public prosecution, headed by Judge Mohamed Hetta, received the police investigation regarding a number of children who have been allegedly molested by a security officer at the Futures British School.
First, a police station in Nasr City received a report of a parent claiming a security officer violated her son by luring him onto the school roof. A little while later, another parent claimed the officer also lured their girl onto the roof and touched her inappropriately all over her body.
Two students, a boy and a girl, identified the defendant from among a group of suspects, confirming that it was indeed him who violated them.
The prosecutor requested the defendant be presented to the children, at which point they identified him as the culprit.
Among the five students violated is a boy under three years of age. Last Thursday, parent S.A. was surprised to find her son returning from school crying hysterically, unable to stop and complaining of a severe pain in his genital area.
In an interview with Al-Masry Al-Youm, S.A. stated that she looked over her son’s body and noticed a swelling on his genitals. She assumed that it was an insect bite and did not imagine that he had been sexually assaulted.
After she put her son to bed, he woke up in the middle of the night, crying and complaining of pain in the same area. She suspected that he might be constipated and began to question him about what had happened to him that day.
He told her that a security officer had taken him into the school theatre, stripped him of all his clothes, and violated him sexually, according to S.A.
She immediately took her son to Heliopolis Hospital, she said, where he was examined by a doctor, who confirmed that her son had indeed been sexually assaulted. A report was then written documenting the examination.
She continued: “I hurried to the Nasr City police station and filed a report — report number 18351. The security officer was arrested. He is 35 years old. The report was then transferred to the public prosecutor and my son was examined by a forensic medicine official.”
She stated that the school administration requested that she keep the incident under wraps, and in exchange they promised the immediate sacking of the security officer. She refused to let him off so lightly, especially since a number of other parents had confirmed similar incidents, with one other parent filing a complaint regarding her young daughter who had also been violated by the same man.
The school then offered a refund of the four children’s school fees, which amount to LE80,000. The school also requested the removal of the children from the school to avoid bad publicity.
The school sent out a notice to all their students, requesting that parents not panic, assuring them that their children were safe with the school and that, while the incident was being investigated, the school was taking all the necessary precautions to ensure the students' safety.
The school PTA then received threats from parents that there would be protests held in front of the 22 branches of the school all over Egypt. They said the protests would call for the execution of the child molester and for further investigations into why the children were left unsupervised.
Tarek Talaat, head of the Private and International Education Sector of the Ministry of Education, confirmed that the ministry is investigating the truth of the claims against the defendant.
In an exclusive interview with Al-Masry Al-Youm, Talaat said that Education Minister Al-Helaly Al-Sherbiny, had announced that extreme legal measures will be taken against the school if the claims against the defendant prove true.
The school stands to lose its licence over this incident.
