Children killed in Isil attack on Christians

Masked gunmen ambush convoy and murder at least 28 pilgrims on their way to Egyptian monastery

AT LEAST 28 people, including many children, were massacred in Egypt yesterday when gunmen ambushed groups of Egyptian Christians travelling along a desert road towards a remote monastery.

The killers lay in wait in the desert outside the city of Minya and slaughtered the occupants of at least three vehicles as they drove towards the monastery of St Samuel the Confessor.

The masked gunmen sprayed bullets into a minibus carrying children from a church group, killing at least six of them, according to Egyptian media.

Christian activists said the attackers also boarded a bus and killed the men before robbing the women of their jewellery and phones and leaving Islamist leaflets among the bodies.

Egypt’s interior ministry said 28 people were murdered, but church officials said they believed the death toll may be significantly higher. Another 22 people were wounded.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the massacre but suspicion will fall on the Egyptian arm of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), which has carried out a series of bloody attacks against Christians in the past year. Suicide bombers killed dozens in strikes on churches in April and December last year and hundreds of Christians fled the Sinai in March after Isil began a campaign of killings.

Last night Egypt retaliated with fighter jets pounding militant camps in eastern Libya, President Abdel Fattah el-sisi announced.

He vowed to continue striking bases used to train militants irrespective of their location. “We will not hesitate to protect our people from the evil,” he said in a televised speech last night.

Egypt is home to around nine million Christians – around 10 per cent of the total population – and analysts believe that Isil is targeting them partly out of religious hatred but also in an effort to foment sectarian tensions.

“Groups like Isil have made it an objective to exploit long-standing tensions between the Muslim community and the Christian minority,” said Zack Goldsmith, an analyst with the Atlantic

‘It was a horrible scene. People were lying dead inside and outside the bus, and on the side of the road’

Council’s Rafik Hariri centre. The latest atrocity took place near Minya, around 140 miles south of Cairo.

The gunmen travelled into the desert in a group of pick-up trucks. Police set up checkpoints after the attack and said they were hunting for the killers.

One of the vehicles attacked was a minibus carrying a group of children from the Church of the Virgin in Bani Sweif, a province to the north of Minya.

“They opened fire randomly on all of its passengers. Many children are among the dead,” said Mikhail Ayoub, a Coptic church official.

Many members of one family were killed on a bus as they travelled to a baptism at the monastery, Nabil Kamel Abdel Shahid, the bus owner, told The Daily Telegraph. “It was a horrible scene,” he said. “[People] were lying dead inside and outside the bus, on the side of the road and under the bus.”

One woman who was wounded on the bus said that the killers wore outfits “like military uniforms” and had their faces covered.