Egyptian Christians are resigned but resolute after attacks
2011 bombing remains unsolved
The New York Times
ALEXANDRIA, Egypt — When the bomb went off at St. Mark’s Cathedral one week ago, William Frances had one thought: “Oh, my God, it’s happening again.”
Six years earlier, Mr. Frances lost his mother, his sister and a cousin in a bombing at another Alexandria church that left him devastated. Now he prayed he hadn’t lost anyone else.
“I had enough,” he recalled. “I said: ‘Please, God, no more. Please.’ ”
The coordinated suicide attacks on St. Mark’s, Egypt’s historic seat of Christianity, and at another church, in the city of Tanta, took 45 lives and dealt a heavy blow to the country’s embattled Coptic Orthodox minority. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for both attacks.
The bombing in Alexandria, a bustling seaport of crumbling elegance, also dredged up painful memories of the 2011 church attack that, despite years of investigation, remains unsolved. The trail is stone cold: Not only have the Egyptian police failed to arrest those responsible for the bloodshed, they can’t even say which group carried it out.
Ineptitude? Indifference? As Christians in Alexandria mourned the latest victims, some wondered if this time it would end differently. Not Mr. Frances.
“Nothing has changed,” Mr. Frances, a 29-year-old computer technician, said in a cafe on the city’s sweeping seafront boulevard. “It happened six years ago, it happened this week, and it will happen again. I don’t feel safe in this country.”
His hard-bitten skepticism mirrors that of many Egyptian Christians, who say they have lost faith in a system that swings between an apathetic shrug and outright discrimination.
Egypt’s strongman leader, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, styles himself as a staunch defender of Copts, who account for one-tenth of the country’s 92 million people and who openly rejoiced when he came to power in 2013.
Yet Copts have had little to celebrate under Mr. el-Sissi and find themselves still vulnerable to prejudice, violence and the vagaries of a system in which impunity is rife.
Joseph Malak, a lawyer representing families of the 2011 victims, said a court order he won in October required the Interior Ministry to provide an update on the investigation. He has received nothing.
To people like Mr. Frances, the latest attack was a reminder of how little has changed. “Another president, another regime — it’s all the same,” he said.
Now IS hopes to bomb its way into the equation. Since a suicide bombing at a Cairo church in December, IS has trumpeted its intention to seek a foothold in Egypt by slaughtering vulnerable Christians. Its choice of Alexandria, an ancient center of Christendom, for the latest escalation was a marker of its ambitions.
St. Mark arrived here in A.D. 64, according to church teaching, befriending a shoemaker who became his first bishop. Together they established their first church on a site that is now home to a grand cathedral, with giant chandeliers, walls lined with icons and St. Mark’s head preserved in its vaults.
Last weekend, as the Coptic patriarch, Pope Tawadros II, offered Palm Sunday Mass, a suicide bomber roamed nearby streets looking for a way inside. It was not easy: Egyptian security officials guarded the main approach streets.
But once the Mass ended and the pope had retired to his chambers, the security cordon relaxed. Amgad Bakheet, a rickshaw driver, saw a man walk up to the church gates with his jacket zipped high and one hand hidden.
As the man passed through a security gate with a metal detector, Mr. Bakheet said, he heard beeping. The man stepped back. Mr. Bakheet was flung to the ground, his body peppered with shrapnel.
“I called out to St. George,” he said at his hospital bed Wednesday, wincing from pain, as a friend showed a photo of the metal that medics had pulled from his flesh.
Four police officers, seven Christians and six Muslim passers-by perished in the attack. Hours later, Mr. el-Sissi declared a state of emergency that gave him sweeping powers to try terrorism suspects in emergency courts. In a show of force, soldiers fanned out across the country to guard churches, while armored vehicles took up positions in the streets.
The Interior Ministry identified the Alexandria bomber as Mahmoud Hassan Mubarak Abdallah, a petroleum worker who had returned to his home in Suez from Kuwait last year.
In a television interview, Mr. Abdallah’s wife said she had last seen her husband when he told her he was leaving for Nigeria in December. It was unclear if he had gone.
Yet even as Mr. el-Sissi, in a visit with Pope Tawadros in Cairo on Thursday, vowed to track down those behind the bombings, a crowd set fire to three Christian homes in Minya, 125 miles south of the capital, in a dispute over church-building. It was a stark reminder of the sectarian wellspring the Islamic State hopes to exploit.
A church-building law, passed last year, discriminates against Christians. Mob attacks stoked by rabble-rousers and Islamist ideologues, like the one in Minya, are rarely prosecuted. Few Christians serve in the top ranks of the military, security services and academia.
“The highest people can never be Christian,” said Michael Wahid Hanna, an Egypt expert at the Century Foundation in New York. “They never are. It’s systemic.”