Christians And Muslims Are Fighting In Egypt

Egyptian police teargas Christian protesters

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L16718124.htm

By Tara Todras-Whitehill
16 Apr 2006 16:29:20 GMT

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt, April 16 (Reuters) - Police fired teargas at crowds of Christians throwing stones and brandishing long knives in the Egyptian city of Alexandria on Sunday, the third day of strife triggered by the killing of a Christian.

Groups of Muslims also clashed with the police and with the Coptic Christians, who are angry that police failed to stop a man from stabbing six Christians in two Alexandria churches. At least five people were wounded in the clashes and a Muslim man died early in the day from wounds received in Saturday's violence, a hospital source said. Mustafa Said Meshal, in his forties, had been clubbed on the head.

Around 30 other people were wounded on Saturday in clashes after the funeral of the 67-year-old man stabbed dead on Friday. Cars were burnt and shop windows smashed.

On Sunday crowds attacked at least two cars and stripped them of anything portable. Police arrested 55 people -- five of them Copts and the rest Muslims, police sources said.

Witnesses said they saw groups of young Christian men waving machetes and long knives as they faced police lines near one of the two churches. Some carried large crosses made of wooden poles lashed together.

A group of Muslims attacked the police and the Copts from the other direction but later dispersed. A separate group of people campaigning for communal peace paraded in the same area. The authorities say the man who killed one Copt and wounded five on Friday was mentally ill but Copts and human rights groups have cast doubt on that account, saying it takes more than a few hours to establish a man's mental condition.

An Interior Ministry source said the man was taking revenge for insults to the Prophet Mohammad, apparently a reference to cartoons of the Prophet published mainly in European newspapers.

Christian demonstrators in Alexandria said the authorities were trying to make excuses for what some Copts saw as increasing attacks on Christians.
Three people died in Alexandria in clashes with the police in October during protests by Muslims over a church play which they said was offensive to Islam.

Coptic Christians comprise between five and 10 percent of Egypt's 73 million people, most of whom are Sunni Muslims.

Relations between the two communities are usually peaceful, but there are occasional outbreaks of violence, often over Christian women who convert to Islam and marry Muslims.