CAIRO, Egypt -- The footage is shocking: A man lies screaming on the floor of a police station as officers sodomize him with a wooden pole.

Compounding the shock, it turns out that it was the police who made the film, and that they then transmitted it to the cell phones of the victim's friends in order to humiliate him.

For Egypt, the ordeal of 21-year-old Emad el-Kabir has been something of a Rodney King moment -- a sudden, stark glimpse of a reality which authorities routinely deny, but which human rights groups say is part of a pattern of police brutality.