CAIRO (AP) — Egypt has asked YouTube to remove a video of a woman being sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square during a rally supporting the country’s newly elected president.
Presidential spokesman Ehab Badawy said in a statement that the Egyptian Embassy in Washington made the request to YouTube, which is owned by Google Inc. Officials with YouTube could not be immediately reached Friday.
Badawy said late Thursday that the woman attacked asked President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi during a visit he made to her hospital room to have the video taken down.
In a video of the visit, the woman told the president: “My daughter watches it every day and collapses.”
El-Sissi told her: “I have come to tell you and every Egyptian woman that I am sorry. I am apologizing to every Egyptian woman.”
Sexual harassment has long been a problem in Egypt, but mob assaults have increased dramatically both in frequency and ferocity in the three years since the ouster of longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
Several women were assaulted during Sunday’s inaugural festivities in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the 2011 revolt that toppled Mubarak, which has also seen numerous mob sexual assaults during demonstrations held there since.