New York Times
Attack on Coptic Cathedral in Cairo Kills Dozens
Attack on Coptic Cathedral in Cairo Kills Dozens
CAIRO
— A bomb ripped through a section reserved for women at Cairo’s main
Coptic cathedral during Sunday morning Mass, killing at least 25 people
and wounding 49, mostly women and children, Egyptian state media said.
The attack was the deadliest against Egypt’s Christian minority in years. Video from the blast site
circulating on social media showed blood-smeared floors and shattered
pews among the marble pillars at St. Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral,
the seat of Egypt’s Orthodox Christian Church, where the blast occurred
in a chapel adjacent to the main building.
As
security officials arrived to secure the site, angry churchgoers
gathered outside and hurled insults, accusing them of negligence.
“There was no security at the gate,” one woman told reporters. “They were all having breakfast inside their van.”
A man asked, “You’re coming now after everything was destroyed?”
There
was no immediate claim of responsibility, although the attack bore the
hallmark of Islamist militants fighting President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
who have previously targeted minority Christians over their perceived
support for his government.
It
was the second major attack in the Egyptian capital in three days,
marking a jarring return to violence after months of relative calm. An
Islamist militant group claimed responsibility for an explosion at a
security check post on Friday that killed six police officers.
Mr. Sisi’s strongman rule has come under economic pressure in recent months amid high inflation and a sharp drop in the value of the Egyptian pound.
Threatened street protests last month did not materialize, but the
surging attacks may be an attempt to stoke opposition through violence.
Egyptian
security officials, quoted by state media, said that an explosive
device containing about 26 pounds of TNT had been placed in the chapel.
It went off during Mass around 10 a.m.
Most
of the dead and wounded were women and children, Sherief Wadee, an
assistant minister for health, said in a television interview. Mr. Sisi
declared three days of mourning, state media said.
Hours
later, hundreds of angry worshipers gathered at the church gates to
register their anger. “We either avenge them or die like them,” they
chanted. Tarek Attiya, a police spokesman, denied accusations of lax
security at the church, and said the police had been operating a metal
detector at the church entrance as normal.
A
current of fury and frustration ran through the crowd gathered at the
church gates, much of it directed at Mr. Sisi and his supporters and
expressed in unusually strong terms.
At
one point the crowd broke into chants of “the people demand the
downfall of the regime,” the signature call of the mass uprising in 2011
that led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.
The
crowd pushed out three prominent television presenters seen as
sympathetic to Mr. Sisi — chanting, “Leave! Leave!” — and called for the
resignation of the interior minister, Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar.
Many
Egyptians reported that TV stations broadcasting pictures of the crowd
had cut out audio feeds that carried the anti-government chants.
Such
public anger toward the government has become rare under Mr. Sisi, who
has imprisoned thousands of opposition figures, cracked down on civil
society and demonstrated little tolerance for the mildest street
protests.
The
blast coincided with a national holiday marking the birthday of the
Prophet Muhammad.
Shrapnel pockmarked religious icons and stone walls
inside the church, where witnesses gave graphic accounts of bloodied
bodies strewn across the broken pews.
Hundreds
of people streamed into nearby hospitals, frantically seeking news of
the wounded. Officials said at least six children were among the dead.
Egypt’s
beleaguered Coptic minority, which makes up about one-tenth of the
country’s roughly 90 million people, has been discriminated against for
decades, and has come under violent attack since the uprising that
toppled Mr. Mubarak.
The
leadership of the Coptic Church, under Pope Tawadros II, has been a
vocal supporter of Mr. Sisi, who came to power in 2013. But that support
has also made Copts a target for elements of the outlawed Muslim
Brotherhood.
Islamists attacked hundreds of Coptic churches and homes in
2013, in a backlash after the security forces killed hundreds of Muslim
Brotherhood demonstrators in central Cairo in August of that year.
The
violence smacks of sectarian prejudice because Mr. Sisi’s support stems
from Egypt’s Muslim majority. Tensions between Christians and Muslims
are highest in Minya, the province in upper Egypt that saw the worst
attacks on Copts in 2013.
Coptic
officials in Minya have counted at least 37 attacks in the past three
years, including episodes of houses set on fire and Copts being
assaulted on the streets.
“Once
again the lives of Egypt’s Christian minority are dispensed with as
objects within Egypt’s violent and cynical battle over power,” said
Timothy E. Kaldas, a nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for
Middle East Policy.
After
the blast on Sunday, dozens of anguished Christians, some wearing
black, waited for news of the wounded and the dead outside El Demerdash
Hospital.
Noureen
Grace, her face streaked with tears, waited for the remains of her
sister-in-law, Madeline Michelle. “She was completely destroyed,” Ms.
Grace said, describing the trauma of witnessing the mutilated body. “I
spoke to her only yesterday. We spoke every day.”
Moments
later a red-faced woman, still heaving with grief, walked past. “They
are all dead,” she said, declining to give her name. “They were all my
friends.”
*Photos courtesy of AFP
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