CAIRO – Egypt's Attorney General (AG) has suspended a prosecutor after he ordered the flogging of a man arrested for drinking alcohol, a spokesman said Monday. The prosecution suspended Hussein Anani and opened an investigation, overturning his decision to condemn the man to 80 lashes, said prosecution spokesman Mahmud El-Hifnawy. Apart from ordering the man to be flogged, Anani instructed police in the southern province of Mina to carry out the punishment based on Islamic Shariah law. “The prosecutor (Anani) made two mistakes, pronouncing a punishment not mentioned in the law and then forcing the police to enforce it,” said a judicial source. Egypt's penal code does not mention flogging, however. Years ago police had the right to lash disobedient prisoners, but even that has been banned. The man who escaped the lashing, Mohammed Eid Hassan from the province of Mina, said he was arrested for public intoxication after attending a friend's wedding. He said he was questioned by prosecutors near his hometown of Matai, a city some 110 miles (180 kilometers) south of Cairo, for three hours. Hassan said the lashing was ordered after a heated argument with them. “I told his highness the prosecutor to go ahead and carry out the lashing,” he said defiantly. “I am not guilty if something like this to happens to me.” In a copy of the now-overturned decision obtained by The Associated Press, Anani wrote that he had ordered a police officer to carry out “Islamic punishment” against Hassan for consumption of alcohol. Police had refused to carry out the order and instead reported it to their superiors in the Interior Ministry, who then contacted the prosecutor general's office. Rights lawyer Anas Sayid Saleh says that only judges, not prosecutors, have the right to order punishments. “Proof of this is that police refused to carry out the order,” Saleh said. – Agencies
