Cairo — After PETA obtained evidence that a woman was killing animals in shockingly cruel ways for fetish “crush” videos produced locally and sold online to buyers around the world, PETA and a legal team from the Society for the Protection of Animal Rights in Egypt (SPARE) shared the findings of their investigation with the Ministry of Interior, and in a precedent-setting action, authorities swiftly arrested Shaimaa Haridi Masoud Ali, who later confessed to producing and selling videos of tortured animals. She was taken into custody at the Dar Al-Salam police station on charges of cruelty to animals and has already been detained for over two months.
This is the first known arrest for “crush” video production in Egypt and No index entries found.the longest known arrest in the country for animal abuse. PETA has also alerted Interpol to its investigation and is now calling on Egyptian and international authorities to pursue charges against the videos’ buyers.
Among the “crush” acts, the videos show a woman, apparently Shaimaa, standing on rabbits and kittens, slowly crushing them; strangling kittens; slitting the throats of kittens, rabbits, dogs, ducks, and chickens; holding kittens underwater and then cutting their throats; hacking off a cat’s head with a knife; and plucking out a rooster’s feathers and pouring what appears to be hot coffee over the bird’s body before cutting the animal’s throat. In some of the videos, a very young girl apparently watches the torture, indicating corruption of a minor.
“These extremely gruesome videos depict extraordinary cruelty to vulnerable animals painfully crushed and hacked apart for buyers’ perverted satisfaction,” says PETA Senior Vice President Jason Baker. “We are sincerely grateful to the authorities who worked tirelessly and acted quickly on the information revealed by PETA and SPARE’s investigation, and this arrest should be a sign to anyone involved in the crush-video industry that we will expose their revolting activities and report them to law enforcement.”
The videos, reported to PETA by a concerned citizen, were advertised in a messaging app group with more than 1,100 members in which buyers could request specific species to be killed as well as particular forms of torture.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any other way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview, and advises anyone who finds videos of cruelty to animals to report them to the local authorities or PETA. For more information, please visit PETAAsia.com or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.