Anba Pachomeus, Archbishop of Beheira, Matrouh and Pentapolis (all west of the Delta) has sent a memorandum to Speaker of the People’s Assembly (PA)
Anba Pachomeus, Archbishop of Beheira, Matrouh and Pentapolis (all west of the Delta) has sent a memorandum to Speaker of the People’s Assembly (PA) Saad al-Katatni asking for measures to be taken to achieve justice for the Copts.
Recently, according to Anba Pachomeus’s memo, the Copts, their churches and church property, as well as Coptic endowments to the Church have all been targets of attacks, encroachment, and violation; not least among which was the attack against the Copts in the village of Sharbat in al-Nahda Amriya, southwest of Alexandria. Under the pretext of unsubstantiated allegations that a Coptic man had circulated indecent photos of a Muslim woman, Coptic homes and property were ruined, looted, and burned; and several Coptic families were forced to leave the village and relocate elsewhere, including the elder of the Copts in the village, Abiskharoun Abu-Soliman, and his extended family. The judgement was issued by the Muslim elders of the village and seven local sheikhs in a so-called traditional conciliation session last Wednesday.
The memorandum drew attention to the encroachment by Muslim locals upon Church-owned lands in the Beheira villages of Abu-Hamra, where a 9-qirat land owned by the Church was seized, and in Qamha where 17 houses were illegally built on Church land. When the Church realised the insistence of the local Muslims to seize the land and build on it, it had offered to legalise the situation by selling the land to the usurpers but, predictably, they refused.
More recently, in the village of Fermag in Abul-Matameer, Beheira, extremists ruined a house being constructed by a Copt, under the pretext that the Copt ‘intended’ to turn the house, once it was built, into a church. The extremists terrorised the entire Coptic population in the village.
And in Matrouh last Wednesday, Muslim fanatics attacked a Church-owned, licensed community centre under construction, and demolished its fencing wall and the guard’s hut, upon claims that the building would later be turned into a church. The governor of Matrouh and the security officials moved to the scene of the violence in order to contain it; the damages were estimated at EGO 103,000.
In his memorandum, Anba Pachomeus demanded justice and security for the Copts and their Church; and confirmation that Egyptian Copts, their homes and property, as well as the Church and its property and endowments, would all be offered protection on grounds of citizenship rights.