By
Caroline Hawley in Cairo
A
series of violent incidents in Egypt over the past few weeks
has shocked the country and prompted national soul-searching
over the causes.
A
wealthy businessman was stabbed to death in an expensive Cairo
restaurant, a boy was killed at school in a middle class area,
and a group of schoolgirls fought with knives and chains,
reportedly over a boy.
|
Sociologists
and newspaper columnists are now busy trying to
dissect what has been described as a new culture of
violence with fears being raised of an
Americanisation of Egypt
|
They
are events that might not be considered unusual in many big
cities but they have raised concern in Cairo.
No-one
who reads the crime pages of Egypt's newspapers would argue
that the country is immune to violence. Murders are described
in often grisly and compulsive detail.
But
they are usually family affairs - a wife who poisons an
abusive husband, or a brother who kills a sister he suspects
of illicit sex.
What
is new about the recent violence is the public nature of it.
Media
scrutiny
Over
the past few weeks Egyptians have been transfixed by what has
been dubbed the "Arcadia murder", after the
Nile-side shopping mall where the stabbing took place in a
smart restaurant last month.
No
motive has been established but both the victim and the
suspected killer were extremely rich.
The
killing has exposed to media scrutiny what to most Egyptians
is the extraordinary lifestyle of a new super-elite who can
afford bodyguards in a country where most struggle to make
ends meet.
Equally
shocking in this conservative, male-dominated society was a
recent fight at a girls' school outside Cairo.
Police
were called in after the girls set upon each other with knives
- apparently in a dispute over a boy.
Sociologists
and newspaper columnists are now busy trying to dissect what
has been described as a new culture of violence with fears
being raised of an Americanisation of Egypt.
