Christians to maintain sit-in in Egypt despite Coptic Pope's plea

Christians to maintain sit-in in Egypt despite Coptic Pope's plea

2011-05-15 23:36:58 GMT+7 (ICT)

CAIRO (BNO NEWS) -- Coptic protesters on Sunday refused to end their sit-in outside the Egyptian TV building in downtown Cairo, despite Coptic Pope Shenouda's request that they go home, Ahram Online reported.

Coptic protesters have staged the sit-in since the attacks on Copts and two churches on May 7 in the Cairo suburb of Imbaba, where 12 people were killed and 240 were injured during sectarian clashes

. Protesters are demanding the release of all Copts detained either in Imbaba during the violence or while seeking treatment in hospitals afterwards.

"It's illogical to leave without having any of your demands fulfilled. We were brutally attacked and many of us were wounded for the sake of what we have been after, we cannot just walk away now," Andrawes Eiweda, a member of the political office of the Maspero Youth, said.


A group of unidentified men attacked on Saturday night the people participating in the sit-in, leaving 78 people wounded, according to Egypt's Health Ministry.

The violent sectarian clashes on May 7 began after hundreds of conservative Islamists known as salafists gathered at the Saint Mena Coptic Orthodox Church in Imbaba to demand the release of a Copt who converted to Islam and was allegedly locked in the church. Abeer Talaat turned herself in to the military council seeking protection days after.

In a phone interview, she said she had converted from Christianity to Islam last September, left her village in Assiut, Upper Egypt and filed for divorce from her husband before hiding in Cairo.

She was planning to marry Yasin Thabet, a prime suspect in the melee in front of the Mar Mina Church, when someone reported her to the church and she was taken captive weeks ago. She said she was held in different church-owned properties across Egypt, where priests and nuns tried to convince her to re-embrace Christianity.

Egyptian police forces arrested seventeen individuals over the violent sectarian clashes.

Sectarian clashes between Muslims and Christian Copts have increased in the past year. A Coptic church in the town of Alexandria was bombed on New Year's Day, killing 23 people. Ten days later, a gunman killed a Christian man and wounded five others on a train in Egypt.

There are around 8 million Christian Copts in Egypt, which represent about 10 percent of the population.

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