Three Muslim men who were accused of stripping an elderly Coptic Christian woman naked and dragging her in the streets of her village in 2016 were acquitted by an Egyptian court, numerous sources reported.
Before being detained and standing retrial for the attack, the three men had been sentenced to 10 years in January. The Court handed down the verdict as the retrial concluded Thursday, and Egypt’s chief prosecutor looked into a possible appeal, according to the Associated Press.
The men are accused of attacking the 70-year-old woman after rumors spread that her son had has an affair with a Muslim woman, causing scandal. Violence erupted in Minya, where a significant population of Egypt’s minority Copts live, and resulted in ransacked or torched Christian homes after the rumors.
Egyptian Coptic Christians attend a mass on July 24, 2016, in the rubble of a makeshift chapel that was torched a few months ago during clashes in the Egyptian village of Ismailia, in the Minya governorate, some 300km south of the capital of Cairo.
(KHALED DESOUKI/AFP via Getty Images)
Anba Makarios, Minya’s Christian cleric, told a talk show in 2016 after the incident that the mob who attacked the elderly woman forced her to walk through the streets while they chanted “Allahu Akbar.”
Copts make up 10% of Egypt’s majority-Muslim population, and have long complained of being the targets of religiously motivated attacks, especially on their homes and churches. While some of the larger-scale attacks are perpetrated by terror groups, Copts also report persecution by regular Egyptians. (RELATED: Museum Opens In Egypt To Honor 21 Christians Killed By ISIS In Gruesome 2015 Video)
In 2017, attacks against Christians included two Coptic church bombings during Palm Sunday processions, killing over 45 people and injuring over 130. In May 2017, gunmen killed 28 Copts who were traveling to a monastery. A year later, 7 Copts were killed while on their way to that same monastery. In December 2017, an Islamic extremist shot and killed eleven people at a church in Helwan, Egypt.
Relatives of killed Coptic Christians grieve by the coffins during the funeral at Abu Garnous Cathedral in the north Minya town of Maghagha, on May 26, 2017. – Masked gunmen attacked a bus carrying Coptic Christians on a visit to a monastery south of the Egyptian capital, killing at least 28 people.(MOHAMED EL-SHAHED/AFP via Getty Images)
Copts in Egypt have claimed that they were unable to play in professional football clubs after club officials have told men with visibly Christian names to change their names if they ever wanted to play professionally.