Thousands of Egyptian Christians went on a rampage on Thursday after six members of their ancient community were gunned down as they left midnight Mass for Coptic Christmas in a southern town.
A Muslim guard was also killed and nine wounded, including three in serious condition.
The eruption of violence in Nag Hamadi, a mixed Christian-Muslim town with a history of religious tensions, served as a reminder of the government’s chronic failure to address sectarian strains in the society at a time when Islamic militancy is gaining ground.
PHOTO: EPA
Thursday’s violence began when Christians smashed ambulances outside the town’s main hospital in frustration over delays in turning over the bodies for burial. Police fired tear gas to disperse the crowd. Clashes resumed after the burial services, with angry Copts smashing shop windows, chasing Muslims off the streets and bringing down street light poles.
The violence followed an attack in which three gunmen in a car opened up with automatic guns on a crowd leaving a church in Nag Hamadi, about 65km north of the ancient ruins of Luxor.
Six Christians were killed along with a Muslim guard, according to security officials. Nine others were wounded, including three in critical condition.
The head of provincial security, Mahmoud Gohar, said security was beefed up in the town and neighboring villages, and checkpoints were set up in the area as tensions ran high among the town’s Christian population. Gohar said an angry crowd from a nearby church smashed two police cars shortly after the attack.
A search for the gunmen was under way, but no arrests have been made by late Thursday.
Christians, mostly Orthodox Copts, account for about 10 percent of Egypt’s predominantly Muslim population of about 80 million people. They generally live in peace with Muslims although clashes and tensions occasionally occur, particularly in southern Egypt, mostly over land or church construction disputes.
The attack on the holiest day in the Coptic calendar was the worst known incident of sectarian violence in a decade. In 2000 Christian-Muslim clashes left 23 people, all but two of them Christian, dead. The clashes were touched off by an argument between a Coptic merchant and a Muslim shopper.
The latest attack, however, was unusual in that it appeared to have been planned, in contrast to the spontaneous violence that had in the past erupted from disputes between Muslims and Copts.
Rushing to contain the fallout from the Nag Hamadi attack, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, top government officials and the country’s top Muslim cleric visited Pope Shenouda III, the head of the Egyptian Coptic church, in a show of solidarity and possible to head off fresh Christian protests.
The official Egyptian news agency quoted Shenouda and Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, grand sheik of al-Azhar — the top learning center for Sunni Muslims — as saying the attack was unlikely to harm what they called the strong bonds between Egypt’s Muslims and Christians.
Similar comments have routinely been made by the two clerics as well as top government officials in the wake of past incidents of sectarian violence, leaving many to question whether such words do anything to help bring the two communities closer.
Muslim-Christian relations in Egypt have had taken added significance in recent years given the growing Islamic militancy and the increasing number of Christians, fed up with their perceived second-class status, becoming radicalized. Widespread poverty, high unemployment and the near total lack of genuine political reform are believed to have helped deepen the sectarian faultline.
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