Fisherman reels in monster 6ft perch... after battling with a CROCODILE

By James Tozer

Last updated at 6:45 PM on 16th October 2009

It's not often that you'd describe the angler, rather than the fish, as the one that got away.

But that was certainly the case for Tim Smith, who lived to tell the tale after tussling with a crocodile over this monster 6ft Nile perch.

The art teacher, 39, had already been engaged in a titanic battle to reel in the 249lb fish for 45 minutes in his tiny motor boat on the Victoria Nile in Uganda when he realised he had a fiercer rival.

Fortunately, however, it was the 39-year-old art teacher who turned out to be the one that got away, managing to tether his catch to the boat before firing the motor into life, leaving his opponent empty-mouthed in his wake.

And he was able to pose by his giant prize - which may be a record - for this spectacular photograph.

Back from his Ugandan trip and home to mercifully crocodile-free Northern Ireland, he told yesterday of his transformation from being the hunter to the hunted.

He had been grappling with the fish while in a small boat on the Victoria Nile in Uganda, about a mile downstream from the stunning Murchison Falls, for about 45 minutes when he realised he had competition.

'Suddenly the boat lurched and I nearly fell out,' he said. 'I didn't really know what had happened.

'The next thing is, the crocodile launches itself at me, mouth wide open.'

Catch of the day: Even a hungry crocodile struggled to fit the perch in its jaws

Fortunately it had misjudged its jump and fell short, hitting the side of the boat.

'If it had launched itself another foot I'm sure it would have got hold of me,' he added.

'It obviously hit the front of the boat to try and knock me out and then went to the other side.

'When you realise something that size is trying to eat you, it's really quite daunting. I just fell back into the centre of the boat, still holding the rod.'

By then the fish had almost given up the fight, lying flat on the water close to the boat, giving the reptile its final chance.

'I just saw the crocodile swim up and grab the fish's tail and spin it around in a death roll, but because of the size of the fish it couldn't get a proper grip,' said Mr Smith.

That enabled him to grab his catch, tie it to the side of the boat, pull up the anchor and make his getaway - and just in time.

'By the time I got the engine started the crocodile was just coming around,' he said. 'I slammed into gear and the croc dived and disappeared.'

Mr Smith, who works at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, then drifted down the river, tied the fish to a tree and went to a nearby wildlife safari lodge to get help.

He is now applying to the International Game Fish Association to have his Nile perch established as a record - until now, the heaviest caught on a rod and line weighed just 230lb.

Nile perch - which themselves have a voracious appetite - were controversially introduced to Lake Victoria and surrounding rivers in the 1950s, quickly decimating native species.

They have, however, provided a useful source of income for local people, both through commercial fishing for export to Europe and also international angling tourism.

I was savaged by police dog after handler let it loose in my bedroom

By Beth Hale

Last updated at 8:14 AM on 17th October 2009

Injured: It took five minutes to get the police dog off Agi Toth's legs after officers allowed it into the house where she works

A nanny has been left scarred after a police dog burst into her bedroom and bit her.

Agi Toth, 24, was listening to music in the top-floor room and did not hear officers pursue suspects into the building.

It seems the police were equally oblivious to her presence. They threw open her bedroom door and released the snarling Alsatian.

It charged  -  probably thinking it had found its prey  -  and sank its teeth into her left calf.

In the seconds before the dog latched on to her, the Hungarian au pair had time to look up.

'At first I said hello, because I did not think anything was wrong,' Miss Toth said. 'Then the dog attacked me.

'The policeman tried to stop him but he couldn't.

'It was so painful. I was so scared. It was like having lots of knives stuck in my leg.'

It took the dog's handler some time to coax it into releasing its grip. Miss Toth was left with a series of deep wounds on her leg.

She was given a tetanus jab and put on a drip delivering strong antibiotics.

The tooth marks in her calf could not be stitched up because of the risk of infection.

After a series of hospital visits for treatment, she still needs to make return visits to her doctor to have her bandage changed.

According to her employer, Jan Kooy, the police have not offered Miss Toth a formal apology or contacted her since the attack. 

Miss Toth, who is studying English, arrived in the UK in July to help Miss Kooy and her husband Hans Poulsen with their three young children.

The incident unfolded at Miss Kooy's home in Clapham, South-West London on September 29, an hour before Miss Toth was due to pick up her employer's daughter from school.

Police are understood to have visited a halfway house for ex-offenders a short distance away. When they arrived a group of suspected robbers fled.

They jumped from garden to garden behind the Victorian terrace, and even leapt into a school playground  -  hotly pursued by police. 

Police dog: The animals are trained to bite and hold on, which is what caused the injuries to the terrified nanny's leg

The suspects saw Miss Kooy's basement door had been left open while builders carried out work.

They ducked inside and went up the stairs into the house. Two of them eventually clambered out of a bathroom window and on to the roof.

Last night Miss Kooy, a credit analyst, said: 'They knocked down the trellis at both sides of my garden and ran past the builders into the basement.

'When the police arrived they apparently shouted "coming in with a police dog", but Agi was upstairs with her door closed listening to music and didn't hear a thing.

'According to her the police couldn't get the dog off her leg for five minutes, but I'm sure it seemed like five hours.'

Residents in the family-dominated street are campaigning to have the halfway house, one of two, relocated.

'This is just one of a number of incidents, and it could have been so much worse,' said Miss Kooy.

'Parents fear for the safety of their children. We feel like we don't have a lot of power.'

A police spokesman said an internal investigation was under way, which will look into whether the dog acted within its training.

Out of your head: Leaving the body behind

THE young man woke feeling dizzy. He got up and turned around, only to see himself still lying in bed. He shouted at his sleeping body, shook it, and jumped on it. The next thing he knew he was lying down again, but now seeing himself standing by the bed and shaking his sleeping body. Stricken with fear, he jumped out of the window. His room was on the third floor. He was found later, badly injured.

What this 21-year-old had just experienced was an out-of-body experience, one of the most peculiar states of consciousness. It was probably triggered by his epilepsy (Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, vol 57, p 838). "He didn't want to commit suicide," says Peter Brugger, the young man's neuropsychologist at University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland. "He jumped to find a match between body and self. He must have been having a seizure."

In the 15 years since that dramatic incident, Brugger and others have come a long way towards understanding out-of-body experiences. They have narrowed down the cause to malfunctions in a specific brain area and are now working out how these lead to the almost supernatural experience of leaving your own body and observing it from afar. They are also using out-of-body experiences to tackle a long-standing problem: how we create and maintain a sense of self.

Dramatised to great effect by such authors as Dostoevsky, Wilde, de Maupassant and Poe - some of whom wrote from first-hand knowledge - out-of-body experiences are usually associated with epilepsy, migraines, strokes, brain tumours, drug use and even near-death experiences. It is clear, though, that people with no obvious neurological disorders can have an out-of-body experience. By some estimates, about 5 per cent of healthy people have one at some point in their lives.

People without any obvious neurological disorder can have an out-of-body experience

So what exactly is an out-of-body experience? A definition has recently emerged that involves a set of increasingly bizarre perceptions. The least severe of these is a doppelgänger experience: you sense the presence of or see a person you know to be yourself, though you remain rooted in your own body. This often progresses to stage 2, where your sense of self moves back and forth between your real body and your doppelgänger. This was what Brugger's young patient experienced. Finally, your self leaves your body altogether and observes it from outside, often an elevated position such as the ceiling. "This split is the most striking feature of an out-of-body experience," says Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

Surprisingly pleasant

Some out-of-body experiences involve just one of these stages; some all three, in progression. Bizarrely, many people who have one report it as a pleasant experience. So what could be going on in the brain to create such a seemingly impossible sensation?

The first substantial clues came in 2002, when Blanke's team stumbled across a way to induce a full-blown out-of-body experience. They were performing exploratory brain surgery on a 43-year-old woman with severe epilepsy to determine which part of her brain to remove in order to cure her. When they stimulated a region near the back of the brain called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the woman reported that she was floating above her own body and looking down on herself.

This makes some kind of neurological sense. The TPJ processes visual and touch signals, balance and spatial information from the inner ear, and the proprioceptive sensations from joints, tendons and muscles that tell us where our body parts are in relation to one another. Its job is to meld these together to create a feeling of embodiment: a sense of where your body is, and where it ends and the rest of the world begins. Blanke and colleagues hypothesised that out-of-body experiences arise when, for whatever reason, the TPJ fails to do this properly (Nature, vol 419, p 269).

More evidence later emerged that a malfunctioning TPJ was at the heart of the out-of-body experience. In 2007, for example, Dirk De Ridder of University Hospital Antwerp in Belgium was trying to help a 63-year-old man with intractable tinnitus. In a last-ditch attempt to silence the ringing in his ears, Ridder's team implanted electrodes near the patient's TPJ. It did not cure his tinnitus, but it did lead to him experiencing something close to an out-of-body experience: he would feel his self shift about 50 centimetres behind and to the left of his body. The feeling would last more than 15 seconds, long enough to carry out PET scans of his brain. Sure enough, the team found that the TPJ was activated during the experiences.

Insights from neurological disorders or brain surgery can only take you so far, however, not least because cases are rare. Larger-scale studies are required, and to achieve this Blanke and others have used a technique called "own-body transformation tasks" to force the brain to do things that it seemingly does during an out-of-body experience. In these experiments, subjects are shown a sequence of brief glimpses of cartoon figures wearing a glove on one hand. Some of the figures face the subject, others have their back turned (see diagram). The task is to imagine yourself in the position of the cartoon figure in order to work out which hand the glove is on. To do this, you may have to mentally rotate you own body as one image succeeds another. As volunteers performed these tasks, the researchers mapped their brain activity with an EEG and found that the TPJ was activated when the volunteers imagined themselves in a position different from their actual orientation - an out-of-body position.

The team also zapped the TPJ with transcranial magnetic stimulation, a non-invasive technique that can temporarily disable parts of the brain. With a disrupted TPJ, volunteers took significantly longer to do the own-body transformation task (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 25, p 550).

Other brain regions have been implicated too, including ones close to the TPJ. The emerging consensus is that when these regions are working well, we feel at one with our body. But disrupt them, and our sense of embodiment can float away.

This does not, however, explain the most striking feature of out-of-body experiences. "It's a great puzzle why people, from their out-of-body locations, visualise not only their bodies but things around them, such as other people," says Brugger. "Where does this information come from?"

One line of evidence comes from the condition known as sleep paralysis, in which healthy people find their body immobilised as in sleep despite being conscious (see "The twilight zone"). In a survey of nearly 12,000 people who had experienced sleep paralysis, Allan Cheyne of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, found that many reported sensations similar to out-of-body experiences. These included floating out of their body and turning back to look at it.

Cheyne suggests that this might be the result of conflicts of information in the brain. During sleep paralysis, it is possible to enter a REM-like state in which you dream of moving or flying. Under these circumstances you are conscious of a sensation of movement, yet your brain is aware that your body cannot move. In an attempt to resolve this sensory conflict, the brain cuts the sense of self loose (Cortex, vol 45, p 201). "It resolves by splitting the self from its body," says Cheyne. "The self seems to go with the movement and the body gets left behind." Perhaps similar sensory conflicts cause classic out-of-body experiences.

The brain resolves sensory conflict by splitting the self from the body. The body gets left behind

Brugger, meanwhile, has a suggestion for how someone might see things even though their eyes are shut, based on one of his patients who reported an out-of-body experience. According to this patient's father, who was sitting by the bedside, he had his eyes closed. Yet he later reported seeing, from a perspective above his bed, his father going to the bathroom, returning with a wet towel and towelling his forehead.

The patient presumably heard his father walk to the bathroom and run some water, and must have felt the wet towel on his head. Brugger speculates that his brain converted those stimuli into a visual image, not unlike what happens in synaesthesia. This still does not, however, explain the external vantage point. "It's not clear how the brain constructs that," says cognitive philosopher Thomas Metzinger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

Metzinger does have a suggestion. Imagine an episode from a recent holiday. Do you visualise it from a first-person perspective, or from a third-person perspective with yourself in the scene? Surprisingly, most of us do the latter. "In encoding visual memories, the brain already uses an external perspective," says Metzinger. "We don't know much about why and how, but if something is extracted from such a database [during an out-of-body experience], there may be material for seeing oneself from the outside."

Whatever the mechanism, the study of out-of-body experiences promises to help answer a profound question in neuroscience and philosophy: how does self-consciousness emerge? It's abundantly clear to us that we have a sense of self that resides, most of the time, in our bodies. Yet it is also clear from out-of-body experiences that the sense of self can seemingly detach from your physical body. So how are the self and the body related?

To address that question, Metzinger has teamed up with Blanke and his colleagues in an experiment that induces an out-of-body experience in healthy volunteers. They film each volunteer from behind and project the image into a head-mounted display worn by the volunteer so that they see an image of themselves standing about 2 metres in front. The experimenters then stroke the volunteer's back - which the volunteers see being done to their virtual self. This creates sensory conflict, and many reported feeling their sense of self migrating out of their physical bodies and towards the virtual one (Science, vol 317, p 1096).

To Metzinger, these experiments demonstrate that self-consciousness begins with the feeling of owning a body, but there is more to self-consciousness than the mere feelings of embodiment. "Selfhood has many components," says Metzinger. "We are trying to fill them in, building block by building block. This is just the beginning."

Florida Everglades fear rise of the people-eating super-snakes

From The Times

October 17, 2009

(George Skene/Orlando Sentinel/AP)

An 11ft Burmese python is recovered from a Florida house

Jacqui Goddard in Miami

An invasion of giant snakes has turned Florida into a potential spawning ground for hybrid super-serpents capable of devouring humans.

The discovery of African rock pythons close to the Everglades wetlands is a worrying development for wildlife officers already troubled by the rising population of Burmese pythons, bred from pets dumped illegally in the wild.

Kenneth Krysko, a herpetologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, speculates that should the two species mate, they could create genetically superior offspring more aggressive, powerful and resilient than their parents — possibly with the ability to strike down human prey.

Rock pythons are “so mean, they come out of the egg striking . . . this is one vicious animal”, he told National Geographic News. “The arrival of the Burmese python was the biggest, most devastating problem that Florida could ever have imagined. Now we have a worse one.”

Native to South-East Asia, Burmese pythons — which can grow up to 20ft long and weigh more than 200lb — have gained a place in the Everglades in the past decade. Tens of thousands are now believed to prowl south Florida, preying on native wildlife, including alligators,

A new report by the US Geological Survey finds that eight other alien constrictors — including reticulated pythons, the world’s longest snakes, and green anacondas, the heaviest — are on the loose, posing a high-risk environmental threat. Five African rock pythons have been found so far. “These giant snakes threaten to destabilise some of our most precious ecosystems and parks,” said Robert Reed, an expert on invasive species.

The report notes that in their natural habitats, Burmese, reticulated and African pythons have been known to kill humans. “The situation with human risk is similar to that experienced with alligators: attacks in the wild are improbable but possible,” it adds.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has run schemes to try to combat the problem, including using thermal imaging to spot them in the undergrowth and licensing hunters. Postmen, meter-readers and FedEx delivery drivers have been trained to look out for snakes. Even so, the commission says that only 35 Burmese pythons have been captured since the hunting season opened in mid-July.

OFF THE SCALE

The world’s largest snake was Titanoboa cerrejonesis, a 42ft (13m) beast that weighed about 250lb (1,135kg) longer than a bus and heavier than a car. It slithered through South American rainforests about 60 million years ago. Fossils found in Colombia indicate that it killed its prey, including the ancestors of crocodiles, by constriction

Maze of underground caves could be the original site of the ancient Greek Labyrinth

By Daily Mail Reporter

Last updated at 2:39 AM on 17th October 2009

An elaborate network of underground tunnels topped by a stone quarry on the Greek island of Crete may be the original site of the ancient Labyrinth – the mythical maze where the half-bull, half-man Minotaur lived.

The site, located near the town of Gortyn in the south of the island, is believed to have as much claim to be the Labyrinth as the Minoan palace at Knossos, 20 miles away.

Knossos, which was excavated a century ago had largely been heralded as the home of the legendary King Minos, who commissioned the Labyrinth to contain the Minotaur, a terrifying hybrid born of a union between his wife and a bull.

The Minotaur, as imagined in 'The Chronicles of Narnia' TV series

Wealthy English archaeologist Arthur Evans, who excavated the site between 1900 and 1935 had keenly encouraged this belief.

But scholars say the new site is an equally plausible setting for the legend, The Independent reported.

The new site, known locally as Labyrinthos Caves, is made up of nearly three miles of interlocking tunnels with widened areas and dead end rooms.

The team from Oxford University outside the caves at Gortyn

But since the rediscovery of Knossos at the end of the 19th century, the site has been neglected by travelers searching for the Labyrinth, and was even used as a Nazi ammunition dump during World War II.

Nicolas Howarth, an Oxford University geographer, said: ‘Going into the Labyrinthos Caves at Gortyn it’s easy to feel this is a dark and dangerous place where it is easy to get lost.

'Evans’s hypothesis that the palace of Knossos is also the Labyrinth must be treated skeptically.

An 1821 illustration of the Labyrinth at Gortyn

‘The fact that this idea prevails so strongly in the popular imagination seems more to do with our romantic yearning to believe in the stories of the past, coupled with the power of Evans’s personality and privileged position.’

A third contender for the site of the Labyrinth exists at Skotino on the Greek mainland.

Mr Howarth added: ‘If we look at the archaeological facts, it is extremely difficult to say that a Labyrinth ever existed … I think that each site has its claim to the mystery of the Labyrinth, but in the end there are questions that neither archaeology nor mythology can ever completely hope to answer.’

Woman raped by step-family from the age of 5

From The Times

October 17, 2009

Three men were jailed yesterday after repeatedly raping a young family member who later became pregnant.

Cardiff Crown Court was told that the woman, who is now 27, had been raped and abused by her stepfather, step-uncle and step-cousin since the age of 5.

When it was discovered that the girl was seven months’ pregnant, at the age of 14, her mother refused to believe that she had been raped and she was beaten with a curtain pole. The court was told that the girl was locked in a wardrobe to hide her condition from visitors. The baby was passed off by the parents as their own, while the girl was sent to India for an arranged marriage, which broke down. The woman approached police last year. She told the court that her current partner had encouraged her to come forward.

The older men, aged 55 and 50 and of Indian origin, were given sentences of up to 20 years. The court was told that they were illegal immigrants and would be deported after their sentence. The step-cousin, aged 27, was jailed for 12 years. To protect the victim’s identity, they cannot be named.

DNA tests revealed that the girl’s step-uncle was the child’s father. In court Judge Patrick Curran told him: “Not content with your own sexual abuse on her, you encouraged the others to treat her like an unpaid and unwilling prostitute. You all then involved yourselves in a group rape.”

Trial stopped after prosecutors didn't have time to do photocopying

By Daily Mail Reporter

Last updated at 11:38 PM on 16th October 2009

No time: Prosecutors claim they didn't have time to copy documents

The case against five men accused of starting a bar brawl had to be dropped because the prosecuting team hadn't got round to photocopying the paperwork.

Officials at the Crown Prosecution Service had spent six months preparing the case but told magistrates that the person responsible for copying the documents was off work having an operation.

Magistrate Sue Arnold said the excuse was unacceptable and refused an application to adjourn the case for yet another week.

The five men were discharged. They had already been bailed five times since the alleged offence on April 24. The CPS had been preparing papers to commit them for trial at Wolverhampton Crown Court.

The case has cost up to £2,000 in legal fees alone, excluding police and court time before Walsall magistrates.

Brij Chaudhry, lawyer for two of the defendants, said the CPS could charge the men again once it 'gets its act together'.

Mr Chaudhry added: 'The prosecution are already two weeks out of time.

'The police knew exactly what the situation was and how many people were involved.'

Paul Bridges, 38, of Palfrey, Samuel Cadman, 23, of Walsall, Nathan Hathaway, 18, of Willenhall, Matthew Lovatt, 26, of Walsall, and Jack Pilbeam, 21, of Walsall, had been charged with affray in connection with a fight which took place in a Walsall bar.

Welcome to the calmest place on Earth. It’s nice and dry, but chilly at -94F

October 17, 2009

Ridge A, a vast icy plateau at the head of three Antarctic glaciers, each the size of Western Europe, is the perfect place for a telescope

Paul Simons

The calmest place on Earth has been discovered, not on a tropical island or a remote mountain valley but on top of a vast icy plateau in Antarctica.

Scientists pinpointed a site, known simply as Ridge A, high up on the Antarctic Plateau, several hundred miles from the South Pole.

The atmosphere at the site is so still that the stars have lost their twinkle because there is no turbulence in the atmosphere to distort the starlight.

Hardly any weather passes by: few clouds, barely a wisp of wind and no falling snow. The air is 100 times drier than the Sahara and the winter averages -70C (minus 94F), which also gives Ridge A the accolade of the driest and coldest place in the world.

Despite the Antarctic’s reputation for blizzards, the storms tend to be confined to the continent’s valleys and coastline as cold air runs down from the high icesheets like water rushing down from mountains.

High on the vast Antarctic Plateau all is peace and calm, though. At 4,053m (13,300ft) Ridge A is so high that the scientists also discovered that it lies at the head of all three of the Antarctic’s huge glaciers, each the size of Western Europe. This hardly makes Ridge A the ideal tourist destination, but for astronomers it is paradise. A team of Australian and US scientists trawled through data from satellites, ground weather stations and computer climate models to find the ideal location for an astronomical telescope that would not suffer from the weather. Reporting in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, they found one of the least cloudy places in the world where the there is no greenhouse effect and the air is bone dry because it is so cold.

“It just jumped out from our search through the data how good Ridge A was — it’s so calm that there’s almost no wind or weather there at all,” said the British astronomer Will Saunders, the leader of the study and visiting professor at the University of New South Wales.

To add to its tranquillity, Ridge A and the surrounding plateau also lie beneath the calm eye of a polar vortex of winds high in the stratosphere, as calm as the eye of a hurricane. “So the air is calm from the ground all the way up into space,” Professor Saunders said. “The astronomical images taken at Ridge A should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers. And because the sky is so much darker and drier, it means that a modest-sized telescope there would be as powerful as the largest telescopes anywhere else on Earth.”

In fact, the scientists hope that a telescope there could take images nearly as good as those from the space-based Hubble telescope. “Antarctica allows you to do a lot of things you’d otherwise have to go into space to do,” Professor Saunders added.

The logistics of building a telescope in such a hostile environment are quite surprising. “In many ways, it’s easier to build a telescope there because there are no hurricanes, earthquakes, dust storms or lightning,” Professor Saunders said.

The biggest difficulty is stopping the mirror of a telescope being covered in frost, but the astronomers found a solution inspired by supermarket chiller cabinets. The vertical displays of chilled food are kept frost-free using a flow of air like an invisible curtain, and a similar flow of air also can keep telescopes free of frost.

However, a bigger problem is less easy to solve. It is very difficult to fix a telescope if anything goes wrong during the six-month total darkness of the Antarctic

Whipped for wearing a 'deceptive' bra: Hardline Islamists in Somalia publicly flog women in Sharia crackdown

By Mail Foreign Service

Last updated at 11:16 PM on 16th October 2009

The hardline Islamist group in Somalia has begun publicly whipping women for wearing bras that they claim violate Islam as they are 'deceptive'.

The insurgent group Al Shabaab has sent gunmen into the streets of Mogadishu to round up any women who appear to have a firm bust, residents claimed yesterday.

The women are then inspected to see if the firmness is natural, or if it is the result of wearing a bra.

If they are found wearing a bra, they are ordered to remove it and shake their breasts, residents said.

Desperation: A woman feeds her child at a newly formed camp for refugees affected by drought in Somalia

yesterday. Somalis are also contending with hardline Islamists seeking to impose a strict form of Sharia law on the country

Al Shabaab, which seeks to impose a strict interpretation of Sharia law over all Somalia, also amputated a foot and a hand each from two young men accused of robbery earlier this month.

They have also banned movies, musical ringtones, dancing at wedding ceremonies and playing or watching soccer.

'Al Shabaab forced us to wear their type of full veil and now they order us to shake our breasts,' a resident, Halima, told Reuters, adding that her daughters had been whipped on Thursday.

'They  are now saying that breasts should be firm naturally, or just flat.'

Officials of Al Shabaab, which Washington says is Al Qaeda's proxy in the failed Horn of Africa state, declined to comment. 

The group's hardline interpretation of Islamic law has shocked many Somalis, who are traditionally moderate Muslims. Some residents, however, give the insurgents credit for restoring order to the regions under their control.

Al Shabaab, which means 'youth' in Arabic, control large swathes of south and central Somalia.

Abdullahi Hussein, a student in north Mogadishu, said his elder brother was thrown behind bars when he fought back a man who humiliated their sister by asking her to remove her bra.

'My brother was jailed after he wrestled with a man that had beaten my sister and forced her to remove her bra. He could not stand it,' Hussein said.

Men were not spared the' moral cleansing'. Any man caught without a beard was been publicly whipped.

'I was beaten and my hair was cut off with a pair of scissors in the street,' Hussein said.

'My trouser was also cut up to the knee. They accused me of shaving my beard but I am only 18. 

'They have arrested dozens of men and women. You just find yourself being whipped by a masked man as soon as leave your house.'

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