A YouTube video clip showing pigs being culled in Egypt as part of swine flu measures has caused outrage at the apparent barbarity of the method of slaughtering the animals.
The clip posted by independent newspaper Al-Masri Al-Yom includes gory images of pigs being beaten with iron bars, piglets being stabbed and animals being kicked alive into bulldozer buckets.
Since going on line on YouTube this weekend, the clip has sparked horrified reactions from Muslims and from the Christian Copt community, who are the main rearers of pigs in Egypt as Muslims do not eat pork.
Although no case of A(H1N1) swine flu has yet been detected on its territory, Egypt is the only country in the world to have decided to kill all its pigs, estimated to have numbered about 250,000 before the cull began.
The WHO has said the drastic measure is not scientifically justified.
In the YouTube video, Mohamed el-Mugharbil, deputy mayor of Kashkus near Cairo, describes how chemicals are also poured on animals caged in lorries, leading to a slow death.
Ali Shaaban, head of the site where the corpses are buried, confirms the method.
“The pigs are covered with chemical products and left for 30 or 40 minutes until they are dead, then we throw them in the ditch,” he said.
The agriculture ministry denied the animals are killed with chemicals.
“These are disinfectants. The throats of the animals are slit before they are buried,” said Saber Abdel Aziz Galal, head of the department of infectious diseases.
Other pictures showed pigs that have been disemboweled but whose throats have not been slit.
Sheikh Salim Mohammed Salim, head of the fatwas committee at the University of Al-Azhar, said that killing an animal that way was “strictly forbidden by Islam ... whatever it is, including a pig.”
The government-controlled Al-Ahram weekly alleged there was chaos at Bassatin, the large abattoir in Cairo where the pigs are supposed to be slaughtered humanely at a rate of 1,200 per day.
“Only the males are killed in accordance with the rules,” said journalist Heba Nasreddin, while “the piglets and sows are hit with an iron bar and left to bleed to death.”
An online petition calling on the Egyptian government to end the “senseless slaughter” has been launched on www.care2.com.
The slaughter caused controversy from its start on May 3, when riot police clashed with stone-throwing pig farmers trying to prevent their animals from being taken away.
Between 300 and 400 residents of the hilly Moqattam slum district of Cairo, where mostly Coptic scrap merchants raise pigs, hurled stones and bottles at police, saying the cull would deny them a key source of income.
The authorities have said it will take six months to complete the slaughter and announced plans to import three machines to boost culling capacity to 3,000 animals a day.
Arab intellectuals, both Christian and Muslim, have accused Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s government of having conspired with the Islamist opposition the Muslim Brotherhood, which opposes rearing pigs “on Islamic land.”
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
FAKE NEWS? ‘When the government demands the press become a state mouthpiece under the threat of punishment, something has gone very wrong,’ a civic group said The top US broadcast regulator on Saturday threatened media outlets over negative coverage of the Middle East war, after US President Donald Trump slammed critical headlines from the “Fake News Media.” The US president since his first term has derided mainstream media as “fake news” and has sued major outlets over what he sees as unfair coverage. Brendan Carr, head of the US Federal Communications Commission — which oversees the nation’s radio, television and Internet media — said broadcasters risked losing their licenses over news coverage. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
RSS