Egyptian police arrested four Christian men who had been assaulted by a mob during an attack on a Coptic place of worship in Egypt, and freed them two days later once they abandoned the complaint they lodged against those who beat them.
The attack took place in the Upper Egyptian village of Tal Al-Quiblya in Minya Province on Wednesday, according to the United Kingdom-based religious freedom advocacy group Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), citing the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR).
A crowd of Muslim residents, most of them women, children and teenagers, reportedly pelted the building with stones while chanting sectarian abuse.
Several Christians suffered injuries. Witnesses on the ground say that the structure and the priest’s car had been damaged.
Officers arrived rapidly and restored order, though only after taking the four Christian men into custody. Their release came on Friday, conditioned on the withdrawal of their complaint against the attackers.
An unknown number of Muslim residents were also arrested.
No permanent church had existed in the village for many years. Believers gathered for prayers and Sunday services in one another’s houses in rotation, an arrangement that left some unable to attend regularly because of the travel involved. They eventually converted a building among their homes into a place of worship, doing so with the awareness of security officials as well as their Muslim neighbors.
The parish priest, Fr. Pavlos Kamal, warned security officials of incitement and harassment at earlier services, according to CSW, which said no preventive action followed before the violence erupted.
CSW President Mervyn Thomas said his organization is deeply troubled by the newest assault on believers in the region and by the recurring reluctance of officers to intervene before crowds turned violent.
"The fact that four victims of violence were detained and were only released upon withdrawing their complaint against their assailants is a lamentable indication of an abiding inequality before the law," Thomas said. "We call on local and state authorities to ensure that justice is served, and urge the Egyptian government to increase efforts to crack down on those responsible for the dangerous rhetoric and hate speech that emboldens extremists and mob groups to attack Christians with impunity."
Christians routinely face legal and social pressure in Egypt.
Earlier this year, an Egyptian court dismissed a bid to designate Easter as a national holiday. Judges rejected the request on procedural grounds, ruling that the matter lay with the prime minister and not the courts, and left its substance unaddressed.
Sunday counts as a normal workday in Egypt, so believers who take leave for Easter risk forfeiting wages and meeting hostility at their jobs. Pupils and students who skip lessons for the occasion can be penalized academically, according to religious freedom advocacy organization ADF International, which supported the bid.
Last December, the Ministry of Labor allowed Christian employees in the private sector to take Easter leave, while excluding those on the public payroll. That same ruling handed Coptic Christians a larger allocation of paid days than it gave Evangelicals or Catholics.
Christians constitute close to a tenth of Egypt’s population. The Coptic Church traces its origins to St. Mark’s ministry in Alexandria in the first century.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has urged that Egypt be added to the State Department’s Special Watch List, which marks states that have carried out or tolerated grave abuses of religious freedom.
Prosecutors have used the country’s blasphemy statutes against people for voicing or defending their beliefs, imposing anything from fines to jail.
In January, Augustinos Samaan, a Coptic Christian YouTuber and researcher, was sentenced to five years with hard labor over videos in which he defended his faith. Dozens of comparable prosecutions are before the courts.
