“Please do not punish my child,” a woman in her 50s tearfully told the reporter of Mehwar TV channel. She offered no name, except to say that she is the mother of Hamo Bika, a popular singer.
Her son, with his trademark of gelled hair and a thick chain around his neck, was also beside her as she received the TV reporter at her modest home in Imbaba, a working-class neighborhood in northern Cairo.
