The charges added new tension to Egypt's presidential election campaign, just two weeks before the voting. More than a dozen women were among more than 300 protesters detained following a protest outside the Defence Ministry in Cairo last weekend. In charges that recalled dark incidents from earlier protests, rights activist Aida Seif al-Dawla said that female prison guards sexually assaulted some women by inspecting their vaginas under the pretext of searching for drugs.u00a0

"This is a sexual assault," activist Seif al-Dawla said. "The women are injured, physically and emotionally." Some of the released female detainees also said they were verbally and sexually abused by troops after they were detained. One of them, Aya Kamal, testified yesterday before the parliament's human rights committee about abuses as she was being arrested. Kamal told the committee in the televised testimony that she was holed up in a mosque to escape troops charging in to break up the protest.