Press Release
For immediate release
For contact:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Tel:+44(0)7976710729
Sharia justice in Arab Spring Egypt.
Egypt: Muslims assault Christians, Muslims acquitted, Christians sentenced to life in prison
On the 21 May 2012 Minya Criminal Court sentenced 12 Christians to life in prison in a case set off by religious tensions in the country’s south. Head Judge Abdel Fattah Ahmed al-Sughayar acquitted eight other Muslim defendants. The Christians were found guilty of sowing public strife, the possession of illegal weapons and shooting dead two Muslims in April of last year in Abu-Qurkas Minya province, about 220 kilometers (135 miles) south of Cairo..
The religious tension in Minya spilled over into violence last year when a Muslim microbus driver, angered by a speed bump outside a wealthy Christian man’s villa, got into a scuffle with security guards who beat him. After returning to his village of Abu Qurqas that evening, he rounded up the villagers who then gathered outside an ultraconservative Islamist group’s main office "Ansar El-Sharia" to protest his beating, the Christians nearby seeing the 3000-4000 Salafis armed with knives, machetes and sticks thought they were going to be attacked and shot from their rooftops down at the crowd, killing two and wounding two others.
For several days after, angry villagers torched dozens of Christian homes and stores. The eight Muslims on trial in the same case had been charged with possession of illegal weapons and burning down the Christian-owned homes and stores after the shooting, later in court were exonerated.
lawyer Alaa Reda Rushdi was who is one of the twelve sentenced was not present at the time of the incident as he coming back from attending court hearing in Cairo to one of his cases he was as well sentenced to life imprisonment.This court case is stark example to the persecution of Christians in Egypt by the last resort for justice, the Egyptian courts.
The innocent lives who are going to suffer life imprisonment for no reason other than being Christians condemned by an Islamist judge, and the exoneration of the mob who burned and razed the Christian homes and businesses is going to be shame and disgrace to the discredited Egyptian justice who urgently need to be cleansed and purged from Islamists contamination and infiltration.
Christians in Egypt are in urgent need for justice and urgent need to feel secure in the land of their ancestors.We ask the Egyptian Supreme Military Council, the Egyptian government to retry this sham case.
We ask every Human Rights organisation, government and anyone who believe in justice to pressurize the Egyptian government to retry this case.