Bishop urges authorities to punish Muslim attackers of 70-year-old Christian woman in Egypt
A Coptic bishop called on the authorities to fully enforce the law against the group of Muslims who attacked and humiliated the 70-year-old Christian woman over a spreading rumor about her son.
"The law should take its course until the perpetrators are brought to justice," Bishop Makarius of Minya said, according to World Watch Monitor. "Such issues have to be tackled head on. The root causes have to be exposed."
He condemned extrajudicial "conciliation meetings," which have forced Copts many times in the past to not pursue their rights.
The controversy began when a rumor began to spread that 31-year-old man Ashraf Attiya was having an affair with a Muslim woman named Nagwa Ragab Foulad, who was married but was living separately from her husband.
Attiya received threats over the alleged forbidden affair, prompting him to leave the city, even if Foulad denied the relationship. She said the rumor came from her estranged husband, who was spreading the accusation so he could obtain a free divorce.
Attiya's mother, 70-year-old Soad Thabet bore the brunt of the Muslim community's ire as a mob attacked her and her husband on the evening of May 20. The attackers beat her husband and dragged her outside the house, stripping her of all her clothes.
"They repeatedly beat me and stripped me of all my clothes. They left me as naked as the day I was born," Thabet said in a local TV interview, according to World Watch Monitor. "They were heavily armed, no one dared approach me to help."
The attackers also burned some of the houses of Christians in the community.
Thabet said they reported the Muslims' threats to the police twice, but they got no help and no officers were posted in the area. The second time they went to the police station, they were labeled as "troublemakers" and were driven out.
After the attack, the police claimed they received no prior notification of the threats.
The traumatic attack forced Thabet and her husband to flee their homes.
Egyptian president Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi promised he would find justice for the 70-year-old woman and the other victims of the attack.
