Female dancer jailed in Egypt for ‘inciting debauchery’

An Egyptian court Sunday sentenced three people involved in a racy music video to one year in prison with labor for “inciting debauchery.”

The music video, titled “Hands Off” or “Sib Eddi” in Egyptian Arabic, contains scantily-clad dancing and shaking but no nudity. Reda al-Fouly, the woman dancing in the low-budget video, was arrested in May along with the clip’s cameraman after it went viral on social media.

The original clip has been viewed 1.9 million times on Youtube, with multiple copies of the video viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Wael el-Sekedi, the third person sentenced in the case, is believed to have fled the country for Tunisia after some social media users called the video scandalous, according to the prosecutor.

Ahmed Bakly of the Giza prosecution said in a statement last month that the clip “disrupted morality.”

In April, an Armenian belly dancer was sentenced to six months in jail for insulting Egypt’s national flag during a performance last year.

The dancer, known as Safinaz, was tried for wearing a costume that resembled the tri-colored flag during a performance last year in the Red Sea resort town of Ain Sokhna.

Egypt is one of several Islamic countries that enforce modest-dress laws in the Middle East.

Local activists have complained of an increasingly hostile environment for minority groups, gays and women, amid crackdowns on Islamist groups in the country, some of which are fighting an insurgency against the Egyptian regime.