Court jails woman for 3 years for ‘harassing’ monkey

An Egyptian court has sentenced a 25-year-old woman to three years in prison for “sexually harassing” a monkey in the country’s north, state daily Al-Ahram reported Friday.

A court in Mansoura city charged Basma Ahmed with “inciting debauchery” and “committing an obscene act in public”, a judicial source told the newspaper.

She was arrested in October after a 90-second video of the incident went viral, Al-Ahram said.

The video shows Ahmed laughing while touching the genitals of a monkey at a pet shop in the Nile Delta city and making sexual innuendos as people around her chuckle.

At court she “confessed… to the incident but said she did not mean to commit an indecent act and that she had been tickling the monkey”.

The video sparked a fierce backlash online.