28 Christian pilgrims die as militants ambush bus
Gunmen demand allegiance to Islam, then start shooting.
Dressed in military fatigues, the gunmen waved down a bus filled with Christian pilgrims as it wended its way down a dusty sideroad in the desert of western Egypt, headed toward a monastery.
Claiming to be security officers, the gunmen ordered the passengers to get out. They separated the men from women and children, and ordered them to surrender their mobile phones. They instructed the men to say the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith.
When the men refused, the gunmen started to shoot. At least 28 people were killed, several with a single shot to the head, according to Egyptian authorities and relatives of the victims.
The attack in Minya governorate, 120 miles south of Cairo on Friday, was a coldblooded escalation of a campaign of sectarian violence targeting minority Christians that has left more than 100 people dead since December and shaken the country’s government.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility in the latest assault, many of whose victims the Egyptian Health Ministry said were children. Yet it bore all the hallmarks of the Islamic State, which in the past six months has dispatched suicide bombers into crowded Sunday services in three cities and caused an entire community of Christians in northern Sinai to flee their homes in panic.
The Egyptian response to the attack came hours later. Tamer Mohamed, a spokesman for the Egyptian military, said Egyptian fighter jets had carried out airstrikes on six militant camps in eastern Libya.
News of the airstrikes came as President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi delivered a speech warning that the attack on Christians “will not go unanswered.” Egypt “will never hesitate to launch strikes against terrorist camps anywhere,” he said, calling on President Donald Trump and the international community to act against states that finance terrorism.
The attack in Minya, a governorate straddling the Nile where about one-third of the population is Christian, signaled the widening geographic reach of extremist militants in Egypt, and the failure of el-Sissi’s intelligence services to penetrate their ranks and prevent further attacks.
“It shows a new focus on a soft targets for maximum carnage,” said Mokhtar Awad, an expert on Egyptian militancy at George Washington University.
At least seven armed assailants, some masked, lay in wait for the victims on a sandy road leading from a busy highway to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, which is home to about 100 monks. They attacked three vehicles traveling in convoy — two buses carrying worshipers from the nearby governorate of Beni Suef, and a pickup truck carrying laborers, all headed to the monastery.
“Everyone is trying to identify the dead and wounded,” said Bishop Makarios, the leader of the Copts in Minya and a critic of Egyptian security lapses. “There is no time for anger yet.”
An escalation of violence against Christians.