Egypt: Gunmen force Christian pilgrims off bus, at least 28 killed
CAIRO — Dressed in military fatigues, the gunmen waved down the 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 the women and children, and ordered them to surrender their mobile phones. They instructed the men to recite 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 Friday in Minya province, 120 miles south of Cairo, was a coldblooded escalation 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, and, according to the Egyptian Health Ministry, many of the victims were children. Yet the attack bore the hallmarks of the Islamic State, which in the past six months has dispatched suicide bombers into crowded Sunday services in three Egyptian cities, and caused an entire community in northern Sinai to flee their homes in panic.
The Egyptian response came hours later. As President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi delivered a speech from the presidential palace warning that the attack on Christians “will not go unanswered,” the military announced that Egyptian fighter jets had carried out airstrikes on several militant camps inside Libya. In eastern Libya, a military force led by Gen. Khalifa Hifter, a close ally of Egypt, said it had taken part in the air raids, Reuters reported.
State media said some attacks hit Derna, a town in eastern Libya that is home to several Islamist militias. It was not the first such reprisal. Egypt also carried out airstrikes inside Libya in 2015 after militants beheaded 21 Coptic Christian migrants.
In staging the Minya attack, 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 a convoy — two buses carrying worshippers from the nearby province of Beni Suef, and a pickup truck carrying laborers, all headed to the monastery.
Among the first to die were the drivers, like Atef Mounir, a 62-year-old construction worker who was killed by a single gunshot to the head. His nephew David Gamal recounted Mounir’s death based on the testimony from survivors of the attack.
“They said the terrorists made a group get out of their vehicles and took their phones,” he said, speaking from the hospital where he had come to identify his uncle’s body. “Then they shot everyone.”
Peter Edwar, a Christian activist who was among the first on the scene, said some men had been forced to say the shahada. Some witnesses reported the militants filmed the entire attack.
“By the time they killed half of the people, the terrorists saw cars coming in the distance and we think that that is what saved the rest,” said Magdy Malek, a lawmaker in Minya who visited victims of the attack Friday. “They did not have time to kill them all. They just shot at them randomly and then fled.”