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.
An Egyptian court has sentenced a Coptic Christian to three years in prison after he was found guilty of “insulting Islam in the first degree”. Abdo Adel, 43, from Menbal, a village in Egypt’s Minya governorate, 200km south of Cairo, was accused in July of publishing a post on his […]
The Egyptian Parliament will soon look into removing religious affiliation from ID cards, Al-Monitor reported last week. The proposed bill will be submitted to the parliament by Ismail Nasr El-Din to “pave the way for a civil state that respects the values of citizenship”, according to the website Cairo Scene. […]
Egypt’s Copts are still reeling from a second bus attack in two years on the desert road to a monastery in Minya and asking why there was no protection for them. It should have been a joyful day. On Friday 2 November a Coptic family had celebrated the baptisms of two […]
An Egyptian court sentenced a man to death last Saturday, 17 November, for the killing of an 80-year-old Christian doctor in Cairo in September last year, reports The Associated Press. The 40-year-old assailant, whose identity remains undisclosed, entered the doctor’s office in the Egyptian capital pretending to be a patient, […]
Egypt’s interior ministry claimed yesterday to have killed 19 Islamist militants suspected of carrying out the bus attack on Friday that killed seven Copts and injured over a dozen others. The militants were killed in a shootout in the desert area west of Minya governorate, where the attack took place, […]
At least seven people have been killed and 14 injured in another attack on a bus of Coptic Christians travelling back from a monastery in Egypt, Reuters reports. The attack reportedly took place at almost exactly the same location as the May 2017 attack by Islamist militants which left 28 […]
The Coptic Christian woman who lost the right side of her face in a bomb attack on her church in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, in 2016 is now in Germany for a complicated operation, World Watch Monitor has learnt. Samiha Tawfiq will be treated at a university hospital in the […]
Egypt’s military court has handed death sentences to 17 people for carrying out bomb attacks on Coptic churches in 2016 and 2017, the BBC reports. The attacks, which killed dozens of people, were claimed by Islamic State. One of them was the bomb explosion in a chapel adjacent to the […]
Egypt’s Coptic Christians have been nominated for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for choosing peaceful coexistence over retaliation in the face of persecution, reports the US-based news site PR Newswire. It is believed to be the first time in the 116-year history of the prize that an ethnic religious group […]
Coptic Christians in various parts of Egypt have been left with no choice but to hold funeral services in the streets because of the closure of their churches. Coptic news site Watani reported on a street funeral last week in the village of Dimshau Hashim, in Minya governorate, where the […]