Egyptian police accused of giving "green light" for killings

Egyptian police accused of giving "green light" for killings
Agence France Presse

CAIRO, JANUARY 4: A leading Christian cleric on Monday accused the Egyptian police of having given the "green light" for Muslims in southern Egypt to kill 20 Christians.

Bishop Wissa, whose seat in Al-Balyana is close to the village of Kosheh where the bloodshed took place Sunday, said "there is a police plot against the Copts. The police gave the green light for the attacks." "The police now want to blame the incidents on the Copts. The police want to say that it was the Copts who started the troubles by staging a march and provoking people," he added.

"The security services were capable from the start of preventing these incidents but they did nothing despite large police reinforcements sent to Kosheh," following a brief sectarian clash there on Friday, he added. Both Wissa and police said that 20 Copts ere killed in the violence in Kosheh, which is around 500 kilometers (300 miles) South of Cairo. Meanwhile, the US Copts Association accused Muslim clerics of inciting a mob to kill the Christians. Thegroup said that after hearing such calls, Muslims entered one home and killed a man, his wife and three children, and then took the man's body outside and set it on fire. The group then moved to another house, killing another man and his brother, before also setting their bodies alight, it charged. Police forces failed to stop them, it added.

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.