Three Coptic women from the town of Hawamdiya, in Giza, were assaulted by thugs who forced them to leave a plot of land they owned. The land, a 3.5 qirat plot which the women had inherited, had been handed to the sisters Hikmat, Nagat, and Naema Tawfiq by court order last April after a man named Gamal Hamed Abdel-Latif, famous as Gamal Abu-Ragab had seized it from them. Since that time the Coptic sisters had built a hut on the land and moved in, hoping their constant presence there would dissuade Abu-Ragab from recapturing the land, and would keep him off.
Abu-Ragab and his men constantly harassed and threatened the Coptic women in attempts to sieze the land again from them. They parked old, downtrodden cars on the land and sent thugs to frighten the women away. They threatened anyone who might have contemplated purchasing the land from the women.
On the evening of 1 June, after Ramadan iftar (the sunset meal that breaks the Muslim fast during the month of Ramadan), a number of Abu-Ragab’s men assaulted the women with clubs and sticks and drove them off the land. They then seized it and proceeded to build a fencing wall around it.
The women reported the incident to the police, but Abu-Ragab’s men did the same thing, claiming one of them had been injured by the women. The police caught the three women as well as two of the assailants. All are now in police custody.
Hikmat Tawfiq’s daughter told Watani that her mother and aunts are being denied medical treatment, and that the police are doing nothing about handing the land to its rightful owners. Abu-Ragab, she said, had threatened during the assault that as Nassaara, a derogatory term used for Christians, he would make sure the sisters never got their right to the land. If the case goes to court again, she said, it might take years to regain their land.
The assault case has ben referred to the prosecution.
Gamal Abu-Ragab is a trader and owns the “al-Bayan al-Khassa” private school in Hawamdiya. He has several sons, among them a lawyer and a police officer.
Watani International
4 June 2017