The Cairo court looking into the case of the killing of six Copts and one Muslim during an attack against the Copts of the Cairo district of Khusous last April has adjourned the case to 6 July to notify the witnesses and the forensic doctor who conducted the autopsy for the Muslim who was killed
The Cairo court looking into the case of the killing of six Copts and one Muslim during an attack against the Copts of the Cairo district of Khusous last April has adjourned the case to 6 July to notify the witnesses and the forensic doctor who conducted the autopsy for the Muslim who was killed.
The case involves 33 defendants; 24 among them are Muslims and eight are Copts. Whereas the Copts have been charged with murder, attempted murder, or hiding the criminals; the Muslims are charged with rioting and the illegal possession of guns. Only 23 defendants were present; 10 were in hiding.
The defence team of the Copts began by blowing up a surprise: one of the Copts charged in the case was dead. The defendant 32, Youssef Aziz Wahby, had died in 1999; the official death certificate that proves his death was handed to the court which accordingly deleted his name from the defendant list. Mohamed Abdel-Wahed, a lawyer among the defence for the Copts, said that this proved the investigations upon which the charges were based were severely flawed. “How can there be no-one charged with the killing of six Copts?” he asked, “while six Copts have been charged with the killing of one Muslim?”
Violence had broken out in Khusous last April for reasons that are to this day unclear. The police claim that the violence erupted in the wake of some misunderstanding that came up when two Muslim boys painting a swastika on the wall of a mosque. Apparently, the swastika was taken by the local Muslims to carry Christian intonations. A number of locals, however, claim that the violence erupted because of the harassment of a Coptic young woman by Muslim men.
Watani International
2 June 2013