Egyptian authorities increased security around churches on Monday as sectarian tensions mounted
after a bombing in the coastal city of Alexandria that killed 21 and wounded
nearly 100 leaving a New Year’s Mass.
Egyptian news reports said the authorities want to forestall further unrest as the Coptic Christmas
approaches on Friday. Police officers have been instructed to arrest people
they regard as suspicious and to prevent crowds from gathering outside churches.
On Sunday, Egyptian security officers, many in riot gear, filled the streets of Cairo and
Alexandria to tamp down scattered protests by Coptic Christians and others
blaming government negligence for the bombing.
“If this happened in a mosque, the government would be doing something,” yelled one parishioner in an
angry street protest after Sunday morning Mass at Saints Church, the site of
the bombing, where a crucifix wrapped in a blood-stained sheet stood sentinel.
“But this happens to us every year, and every day, and they do nothing.”
The bombing early on Saturday morning climaxed the bloodiest year in four decades of sectarian
tensions in Egypt, beginning with a Muslim gunman’s killings of nine people
outside another midnight Mass, at a church in the city of Nag Hammadi on Jan.
6, the Coptic Christmas.
Analysts said the weekend bombing was in a sense the culmination of a long escalation of violence
against Egypt’s Coptic Christians, who make up about 10 percent of the
population. But at the same time the blast’s planning and scale — a suicide
bomber evidently detonated a locally made explosive device packed with nails
and other shrapnel, the authorities said Sunday — were a break with the smaller
episodes of intra-communal violence that have marked Muslim-Christian relations
for the past decade.
Instead, it was reminiscent of the 1990s attacks by Egyptian Islamist terrorists on Christians,
tourists and government institutions. Analysts said the flare-up was likely to
increase the domestic dissatisfaction with the 30-year-old tenure of President Hosni Mubarak, who has made preserving Egypt’s stability his guiding principle.
Egyptian authorities asserted throughout the weekend that the attack seemed at least inspired by Al Qaeda or other international groups. Although no one claimed
responsibility for the bombing, some analysts noted that two months ago a group
calling itself Al Qaeda in Iraq threatened attacks on Egyptian churches in retaliation
for what it said had been a Coptic kidnapping of two women who sought to
convert from Christianity to Islam. And in a rare televised address hours after
the attack, President Mubarak said it was the work of “foreign fingers.”
But on Sunday, Egyptian authorities also acknowledged that the attack appeared to have been
executed by local Egyptians, and analysts noted that the government invariably
sought to blame foreign conspiracies or nonsectarian local disputes for
Muslim-Christian violence in an attempt to avoid inflaming sectarian tensions.
The official MENA news agency reported that the authorities were examining the remains of two heads
found after the blast in the belief that one might have belonged to the bomber.
The Egyptian Ministry of Information issued a statement urging news organizations to “emphasize the
national aspect in addressing the national unity issue” and avoid “topics” or
“details” that might “deepen the wounds and add fuel to the fire in an issue
related to the security of the homeland.”
Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which tracks
violence between Muslims and Copts, argued that the government’s denial of
sectarian tension had exacerbated the problem.
“What we see is a heavy-handed response from the security agencies, arbitrary arrests on both
sides of any conflict, and then forced reconciliations, where the victims are
coerced into withdrawing their criminal complaints and accepting the arbitrary
justice,” Mr. Bahgat said.
“The response is driven by security agencies whose main desire is to impose quiet after any
incident and close the file,” he said, often letting off the true perpetrators.
Pope Shenouda III, the leader of Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church, called for the swift prosecution of
the perpetrators and vowed that the attacks would not deter services for the
Coptic Christmas this week.
President Obama, in a statement, called the attack “barbaric and
heinous.” In Rome, Pope Benedict XVI called it a “vile gesture.”
In the aftermath of
the New Year’s bombing, some Egyptians circulated appeals on Sunday over the
Internet urging Muslims to attend Coptic Christmas services in a gesture of
interfaith solidarity.
Others posted mourning messages on the Facebook page of Mariouma Fekry, a young woman killed in the
bombing. Before leaving for the midnight Mass, she had written on her page,
“this year has the best memories of my life” and “I have so many wishes in 2011
… hope they come true … plz god stay beside me & help make it all
true.”
Liam Stack reported from Alexandria, Egypt, and David D. Kirkpatrick, Vt. Kareem Fahim contributed
reporting from New York. The New York Times (abridged)