Multiple news sources reported today that a senior Egyptian general has come forward to confirm that forced “virginity checks” had been performed on women arrested during demonstrations. This had previously been denied by military authorities, but general Amr Imam has not only confirmed but defended the practice as a protective measure for the women’s own good.

Reports of the practice first surfaced in March, around the time of the Tahrir Square demonstrations that led to Mubarak’s overthrow, when a group of protesters informed Amnesty International that they had been “subjected to strip searches while being photographed by male soldiers, then forced to submit to ‘virginity checks’ and threatened with prostitution charges.”

And then Imam told the CNN:

“The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine,” the general said. “These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs).”

The general said the virginity checks were done so that the women wouldn’t later claim they had been raped by Egyptian authorities.

“We didn’t want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren’t virgins in the first place,” the general said. “None of them were (virgins).”

[Source: BoingBoing]