Cairo Religious Clashes Leave at Least 19 Dead
October 9 | Posted by mrossol | Radical Islam Tags: The WestWhere is “the left” when Christians really need them?
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By MATT BRADLEY
CAIRO—Three Egyptian military police officers were among at least 19 people killed in clashes between Muslims and Christians in downtown Cairo on Sunday night in one of the worst incidents of sectarian violence since a revolution in February toppled Egypt’s former regime.
Thousands of mostly Christian protesters armed with molotov cocktails and rocks clashed with several hundred military police officers guarding a state television building by the Nile River where the protesters were trying to demonstrate, witnesses said.
Soldiers charged the protesters with armored cars, running over several people before a group of several hundred men, thought to be from the nearby neighborhood of Maspero, joined the riot on the side of the military.
At least 112 people were injured, according to state television.
Sunday evening’s violence marks the latest flare-up of sectarian tensions in Muslim-majority Egypt, where a law enforcement void has exposed communal tensions in the Arab world’s most populous nation.
Coptic Christian protesters gathered in front of the television building on Sunday to protest what they said was the military leadership’s reluctance to prosecute radical Islamists who attacked two churches in Upper Egypt.
In the most recent incident, fundamentalist Salafi Muslims attacked a church near the city of Aswan in Upper Egypt late last month. Gangs of local Muslims had objected to renovations to the church, which, they said, had been built without a permit.
The attacks occurred even after church officials had acquiesced to demands from local Salafis to remove bells and crosses from the church’s facade.
Egyptian law requires official permission for the construction or renovation of any house of worship, but in practice authorities rarely award permission to build or make improvements to churches. Last week, Coptic officials argued that they had secured proper permission to renovate the Church of St. George. Orthodox Coptic Christians make up about 10% of Egypt’s 80 million people.
Several people who witnessed the violence said the majority of the Christian protesters arrived from the low-income Cairo suburb of Shubra around 4:30 pm. Accounts differ as to who started the attacks.
Mohammed Abdullah, a 22 year old Muslim man who said he witnessed the violence from the beginning, said about 3,000 Shubra youths attacked the military with sticks and molotov cocktails. The military responded by shooting live ammunition into the air as protesters set fire to two armored military cars, a bus and several private automobiles.
Another Muslim man, who said he had joined the protest to express his solidarity with the Christians, said the military and fewer than a dozen “bearded men” who he suspected were Muslim radicals, convened a group of thugs from local neighborhoods to assault the protesters with iron bars.
“It’s a stupid thing that the army is coordinating with the thugs and Salafis,” said Nasser Abdel Mohsen. “Christians are being systematically persectuted.”
By late evening, Muslim and Christian rioters had scattered throughout downtown Cairo. By 10 p.m., fighting between police and protesters was continuing several blocks from the television building in Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the 18-day uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak in February
Cairo Religious Clashes Leave at Least 19 Dead – WSJ.com.
Tags: The West
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