More than 100 thugs also beat her with sticks and slashed at her with knives – disgusting, degrading ‘punishment’ because she dared to join the protests against former President Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party.

Yasmine was back in Tahrir Square yesterday – and once again felt that rising sense of panic as vast crowds clashed.

The two-and-a-half year battle for democracy in Egypt has witnessed a large number of women being sexually assaulted or raped – simply for daring to take a stand.

It is the shameful, untold story of an Arab Spring revolution that went off-track. And perhaps the most disturbing element is that these attacks are said to have been sanctioned by Morsi and the Brotherhood.

Egyptian civil rights activists say that at least 91 women were sexually assaulted or raped in Tahrir Square during protests, which began last Sunday.

The assailants operated in a climate of impunity – encouraged by religious zealots within the government who had called female protesters whores and who had blamed rape victims for not staying home. It is even believed that the gangs were paid by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Yasmine’s nightmare happened last November as she tried to join friends in the square to protest against Morsi’s constitutional changes, which granted him unlimited powers.

‘About 15 men rushed from the crowd and trapped me by linking hands in a circle,’ she explains.
‘It happened quickly and in such a way that I later realised it was well rehearsed. I was cornered, trapped and stripped from the waist up before I had time to recover from the shock.
‘I managed to run, but tripped and fell on my face.’

They were on her again in an instant. Despite her statuesque 5ft 9in frame, Yasmine could do nothing to stop them. The daughter of a businessman and a chemist, Yasmine is a strong, intelligent and confident young woman, who has always felt able to take care of herself. But the numbers were overwhelming.

More sets of hands than it was possible to count clawed at her, grabbing her breasts and groping inside her underwear.

‘It was as if I was in a washing machine, being pushed and pulled and grabbed,’ she says.
‘I didn’t know what was happening to me or when it would end. I thought that I would faint or die, but I still tried to fight back.’

She was dragged several hundred yards as the mob feverishly tore at her clothes. Some tried to cut them off while she desperately clung to her trousers.

‘When they couldn’t get the jeans off, they slit them at the back with a knife. I was bleeding from my face and nose, but that didn’t stop them.’

Surprisingly, her attackers were not feral kids or teenagers, but grown men ‘aged in their 20s to 40s.’ Some were well-dressed and respectable.

Yasmine adds: ‘One guy tried to French kiss me and I bit his tongue so hard it bled. He screamed in agony and started kicking me in the back as I lay on the ground.

'They tried to put me in a car, but there were so many people crowding around it that they couldn’t open the door. I ended up pinned to the bonnet as they drove a block away.’

The attack continued as the vehicle crawled along at slow speed. Some of the men whispered menacingly, ‘We are going to f*** you.’

By now Yasmine was covered with blood and excrement, having been pushed into sewage on the ground. Dozens of people had stood by watching her ordeal in the square – but none intervened.

Thankfully, she was eventually rescued by a woman dressed in traditional Islamic dress and several of her male friends and neighbours. But it was two months before Yasmine reported the crime – and then only because several friends also suffered attacks.

‘I felt guilty,’ she says. ‘I thought that if I had said something before, they would have known the dangers.’

Yasmine says she wanted to shame the authorities into taking action. ‘I do not want to live in a country where men think it’s OK to do this to a woman. I don’t know any girl who has not suffered from verbal or physically sexual assaults.’

She blames a cultural acceptance of sexual harassment and an orchestrated campaign by the state for what happened – and is calling for a comprehensive national strategy on the part of the government to change public attitude.

Mervat El-Tallawy, a prominent Egyptian female politician, told The Mail on Sunday it was women who had suffered most under Morsi’s regime. ‘His party regard them as little more than chattel and sex slaves,’ says Ms El-Tallawy, chairwoman of the National Women’s Council.

She described the mob rapes as ‘sexual terrorism’ aimed at scaring women into a submissive role.
‘In February 2012, members of the Shura Council, Egypt’s legislative body, blamed women for the increase in sexual assaults “because they put themselves in such circumstances’’,’ says Mrs El-Tallawy. ‘In doing so, they sent the signal that it is OK for a man to touch any woman in the street.

‘Morsi’s government moved to deny women the right to right to seek a divorce under Islam, supported female circumcision, sacked women in top government jobs and tried to lower the age of consent for girls to marry from 18 to nine.

‘His party is notoriously anti-women. Its members don’t see us as citizens, even though we make up nearly half the population. 'They want to treat us like slaves whose role is to bear babies and serve the sexual needs of men. They have tried to take us from a modern, civilised and religiously tolerant country back into the dark ages.’

Certainly, the fact that two billion Egyptians took to the streets to get Morsi out testifies not just to his unpopularity but that he has deeply divided the country.

Even families have been split over their support of his government, as television reporter Lenah Hassballah, 21, knows only too well.

‘My great-grandfather on my dad’s side was one of the founders of the Brotherhood,’ she says sheepishly.
'So while her father and his side of the family are in favour of Morsi, her mother hates what he stands for. ‘She used to say that if they got divorced it would be the president’s fault,’ Lenah added.
She, however, was raised to make up her own mind: ‘I suppose that’s the Egyptian way. No one should force religion on anyone.

‘I was very excited when Morsi was elected, but he’s made some very stupid decisions which have made me doubt him. Harassment of women has been deeply rooted in our psyche and culture, but it’s fair to say that he made things worse.’

While accepting that the ex-president, currently under house arrest, failed to live up to expectations, she says public expectations were too high. Lenah is obviously trying to maintain some neutrality – probably for family cohesion.

‘I would have given him a bit longer, but then again, I also supported the call for him to go,’ she said. On this last point she would find no dissenters in Tahrir which has been the scene of jubilant anti-Morsi celebrations since last Wednesday night.

Many Egyptian people are just delighted that he has gone. People such as Coptic Christian Jusef, 70, a retired English teacher, who faced persecution under Morsi: ‘I’m glad to see the back of him. He let the country down. 'He was divisive and dangerous. I supported the revolution of 2011 because it was not supposed to discriminate.’

Businessman Mahmoud Khater, 33, and his wife Amal Ibrahim, 25 may have seemed out of place among the anti-Morsi crowd celebrating in the square last week but they also desperately wanted him out.
‘We don’t want the Muslim Brotherhood,’ Amal says angrily. ‘They are terrorists who believe in their own corrupted version of Islam.’

Mahmoud concurred: ‘They were running the economy into the ground. Not only were they incompetent, but they had betrayed the revolution of 2011.’
He supported the revolution, he says, because it called for ‘freedom, true democracy, dignity and bread’.

It is their dignity that women like Yasmine now want enshrined in a new constitution.
A new interim government has pledged it will do more to protect the rights of women. Yet Yasmine, who still suffers traumatic flashbacks and panic attacks after her rape, is not optimistic.

A diehard plutocrat, she remains suspicious of the military’s continued role in Egyptian politics.
She says: ‘They tried to hold on to power after Mubarak, so we will have to wait and see if we are replacing one dictatorial leadership for another.’