Lovers and Helmets

After booming the circulation of Egyptian newspapers for the past two months, the trial of Ahmed Salem, biggest Cairo sensation of the decade, came to its quaint close last week. The sloe-eyed, romantic Egyptian public loves a love story. This one was dished up hot and fresh every morning in court when pomaded, silk-shirt-wearing Ahmed Salem's expensively gowned wife Amina rushed in and was permitted to embrace the prisoner passionately just as the judge was taking his seat. Ahmed stood accused of "bribery, forgery and perjury" in selling to the Egyptian police as hard steel helmets a quantity of cheap and flimsy iron headgear. But to the Cairo populace the chief interest seemed to be how affectionate a wife was "Egypt's Beauty Queen," as some of the Kingdom's more romantic newshawks began calling her.

Ahmed Salem himself stood right up to the State, shouted in court that the Egyptian Government habitually indulges in bribery, forgery and perjury, so why should not Government contractors? He ridiculed the King's Prosecutor for demanding the death penalty, ingeniously argued: "The air-raid wardens and police will take cover during air raids and their steel helmets will not be needed anyway. So how can I be accused of treason or sabotage? By using iron, I was actually saving steel for other armaments. The Egyptian State really ought to commend my patriotic act."

It was also disclosed that Ahmed Salem had sought to flatter Egyptian royalty by designing special silver-rimmed helmets for young King Farouk and Queen Farida. Their Majesties' helmets were to have sported the Egyptian royal coat of arms "to facilitate identification in case either royalty became a casualty."

All this was gaily reported in the Egyptian press along with tales of how the Beauty Queen loved her present and fourth husband so dearly that she was having him fed in jail with food sent over from Cairo's most expensive restaurant. It was Husband No. 1, a Syrian millionaire, who left Amina so well off that ever since she has been living the life of a female Tommy Manville. "My Ahmed dearly loves music," she explained to Egyptian reporters, bug-eyed at her jewels, "so I have installed a powerful radio receiver in a teashop near his cell." Every afternoon, the Beauty Queen dashed from court to teashop, turned on the radio full blast and sat yearning for her 35-year-old Iron Helmet Romeo.

There never seemed much doubt of Ahmed Salem's guilt. One of his partners, with whom he had quarreled, spilled the whole story of how they used forged Egyptian War Ministry stamps to pass off their shoddy iron helmets as the tested and approved steel article. However, by the time the trial ended Ahmed & Amina were so nationally popular as great lovers that Egyptian justice forbore to crack down hard. Ahmed got, not death, but two years at hard labor.

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