Clashes in Egypt leave 16 dead

SOHAG, Egypt, Jan 3: Up to 16 people were shot dead during clashes between Muslims and Coptic Christians in southern Egypt in one of the bloodiest sectarian incidents in the region in two decades, reports AFP.

Bishop Wissa of al-Balyana said early Monday that 16 people, all of them Copts, were killed Sunday in the village of Kosheh, although police said 10 people had died and did not specify how many of them were Christian.

The clashes in Kosheh, around 500 km south of Cairo, spread to the nearby town of Dar Es-Salam where chanting Muslims burned and smashed businesses owned by Copts, police told AFP.

Sunday's flare-up followed clashes two days earlier when three Copts were reported wounded in fighting that officials said began with a financial dispute between a Christian and a Muslim merchant.

Authorities imposed curfews on both Kosheh and Dar Es-Salam, around 10 km apart, late Sunday but there were reports of more shooting incidents after the security clampdown.

The interior ministry said in a statement received by AFP Sunday that the situation was "under control." It also gave a toll of eight dead and several wounded.

Local authorities meanwhile called together representatives of the two communities in Kosheh in an attempt to bring about a reconciliation, a local official told AFP.

"The names of 16 Copts who were killed have been communicated to me" by the residents of Kosheh, Bishop Wissa told AFP in Cairo in a call from his church in Balyana, about 20 km from the site of the violence.

The bishop said there had been a "premeditated plan" to trigger the bloodshed but did not elaborate.

There was no sign of involvement by Islamic militant groups whose campaign against the government, police, foreign tourists and Christians has largely been crushed in recent years.

The day's first deaths were a Coptic Christian, identified by the interior ministry as Abdel Massih Mahrus Iskander, and his four-year-old daughter Samia Mahrus.

In Dar Es-Salam, police fired shots to break up up the rampaging crowd, but no one was reported hurt in the police action. Several people from both communities in Dar es-Salam and al-Kosheh have been arrested.

A source close to the police said the situation in both places was still tense on Sunday evening, and all vehicles were being carefully checked.

The interior ministry in Cairo, which said the mob violence in Dar Es-Salam involved Muslims as well as Christians, reported that police had seized stolen goods and two revolvers from cars in the area.

The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights charged in 1998 that police arrested 1,200 Copts in Kosheh in August of that year, torturing several of them, following the murder of two Copts.

Police denied the report but the four officers accused of the torture were reassigned to administrative posts.