WATANI International
15 June 2011
Coptic protests escalated yesterday in Minya, Upper Egypt, after two underage Coptic women disappeared last Sunday. Hundreds of Copts gathered in front of the Minya Security headquarters demanding the return of the two young women and accusing three Muslim men of having kidnapped them.
The angry crowd shouted slogans calling on Minya governor Samir Sallam to bring back the two young women. “Last Sunday, 17-year old Christine Ezzat Fathy, went with her 14-year old cousin Nancy Magdy Fathy to the village church of the Holy Virgin to attend Mass at 7:00am,” said Sadeq Hassan, a family relative. “We waited for them to come back, but they never did,” he said. “We enquired at the church and found out they had not attended Mass in the first place, so we filed a report with Minya police station that they were missing.”
“Once we left the police station, an unknown woman called us from one of the girls’ mobile phones, saying she was a nurse at Qena Public Hospital and that the hospital received the bodies of the two dead young women that morning.” Hassan said the nurse asked them to go and collect the bodies. “When we quickly contacted relatives in Qena and asked them to go to the hospital, they went and found the nurse’s story to be untrue,” he said.
Following some investigations, said Hassan to Watani, we discovered that some young ‘Arabs’ from Assiut—‘Arab’ is commonly used in Upper Egypt to denote people who originate from tribal desert dwellers—and who live near our village, were involved in this incident. “We held a meeting with the elders of their family and they admitted that our two young women were with them,” he said. They promised to return the two young women, whom they said were then in Cairo, especially that they were underage.
Until Tuesday the two Coptic girls had not been returned to their families. “When we called the young Arabs,” he said, “they told us that the young women were in the hands of people ‘bigger than us’ and that these people did not agree to bring them back. We asked to listen to our daughters’ voices so they put one of them on the phone; she talked in a quivering worried voice, and it was clear that someone on the other side was dictating to her what to say.”
The Coptic protestors in Minya were joined by other families whose daughters had disappeared under various conditions. From their part the Maspero youth decided to go into an open sit-in until the two young women’s destiny is known.
According to Hassan, Nazlet Ebeid village in Minya, where the two Copts come from, is among Minya’s largest economic and commercial villages. It’s population is Coptic, and they are well-off traders, which makes them attractive targets for blackmail or ransom.
Rumours circulating in the village say the kidnappers have asked the girls’ family for ransom, others say that there was a love affair between the two Copts and the Muslim men, but none said the incident had anything to do with the two Copts converting to Islam. Nevertheless, Christine’s father said some organised Islamist groups were behind his daughter’s disappearance and that their aim was to make the two Copts convert to Islam.
Whichever of the different accounts being circulated is true, commented Ussama Mansour, a lawyer who took part in the sit-in, the two Copts must be returned, especially that they are minor and are protected by Child’s Law, which criminalises the capture of a minor, even if she goes of her own free will.
On the other hand, General Mamdouh Maqlad, chief of Minya Security, confirmed that the Security apparatuses are taking all measures to find out where the two young women are, and he pledged to bring them back within 48 hours. He thought it unlikely that sectarian reasons lay behind the disappearance.