Over 100 Coptic Christians were killed in 2017 in a wave of deadly attacks by militants belonging to, or inspired by, the Islamic State group, which has vowed to “wipe them out”. Egypt’s Copts, who account for around 10 per cent of the population, were also targeted in 2013, after they were perceived as supporting the ousting of President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood government. Scores of churches across the country were attacked and burned.
Two Coptic Christians in a village in Minya, Upper Egypt are facing charges of inciting sectarian strife and insulting Islamic leaders, after comments from one of the men on social media, shared by the other, caused some Muslims in their village to riot. Bassem Abdel-Malak Fahim, 25, from the village […]
An Egyptian court has sentenced seven people to death for their links with the Islamic State (IS) group in Libya. An unspecified number of the condemned were accused of taking part in the beheading of 20 Egyptian Coptic Christians and a Ghanaian on a beach in Libya in 2015 – an […]
“I remember a Coptic Christian girl from a rich, well-known family in Minya. She was kidnapped by five Muslim men. They held her in a house, stripped her and filmed her naked. In the video, one of them also undressed. They threatened to make the video public if the girl […]
Copts in the village of Ezbat Al-Forn, in the Minya governorate, have their church back after it was forced to close “for security reasons” last month, and celebrated this with a mass on Sunday morning (10 September) – the same day that another village church reopened elsewhere in Minya. The […]
Egypt’s Education Ministry has rejected another court order to return a Coptic primary school to the Coptic Bishopric of Baylana and Dar as-Salam in the southern governorate of Sohag and, instead, issued a decision to postpone the handover for three years. The order came after an appeals process, which has […]
A 46-year-old Coptic woman in Egypt’s port city of Alexandria was attacked and stabbed multiple times by an unknown man after attending a church service on the evening of 21 August, reports Coptic news site Watani. When Amal Awad left the church of the Holy Virgin and Archangel Raphael, in […]
Tensions between Muslims and Coptic Christians in a village in Upper Egypt have reportedly softened following clashes at the weekend. Copts in the village of Ezbat Al-Forn, in the Minya governorate, were stopped from holding mass at a private home on Sunday (20 August) because they had no permit. Local […]
The 400 Coptic Christians in Ezbat Al-Forn, a village in Egypt’s Minya governorate, can no longer access their church after they were stopped from holding Sunday mass and banned from the premises by police yesterday (20 August), according to Coptic news site Watani. When the Copts started chanting “Kyrie Eleison […]
The family of a Coptic Christian soldier who died last month on his first day at work – in the same regiment where another Copt died in mysterious circumstances in November 2015 – say he was murdered because of his Christian faith. Having just completed his army training, 22-year-old Joseph […]
The more than 1,600 Copts in the village of Kom El-Loufy in Minya, Upper Egypt are still waiting for a new church building, seven years after their previous building was closed the same month it was opened. Ever since the Copts started looking for a new venue, they have experienced fierce […]