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CAIRO (Reuters) — Five people were killed and eight were wounded in clashes between Christians and Muslims in a town near Cairo, security officials said Saturday.
CAIRO (AP) — Clashes between Egyptian Muslims and Christians erupted early Saturday in a town near Cairo, leaving at least five men dead, security officials said.
Confrontations between Christians and Muslims have increased in Egypt since the overthrow of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 gave freer rein to hard-line Islamists, who had been repressed under his rule.
Investigators said they were waiting for autopsy reports to confirm how the men — four Christians and a Muslim — were killed in a suburb of the city of Shubra el-Kheima, north of Cairo.
In the latest episode, Four Christians and one Muslim were killed Friday when members of both groups started shooting at one another in Khusus, outside the Egyptian capital, the officials said.
The police said the clashes started when young Muslims drew inflammatory symbols on an Islamic institute and a local mosque. Christian onlookers and Muslims nearby began quarreling and soon residents wielding guns began firing at one another.
The state news agency MENA put the death toll at four.
Residents offered different accounts of what set off the violence, and they said the police arrived hours after the fight ended. Some residents said the violence was set off by feuding families. Others said the fight began after a woman was verbally harassed in the street.
The violence broke out late Friday when a group of Christian children were drawing on a wall of a Muslim religious institute, the security officials said. No other details were immediately available.
The clashes also resulted in a fire near a church, which is now closed and guarded by armored police vehicles.
MENA quoted a Christian official as saying that unidentified assailants had attacked a local church during the clashes and set parts of it on fire. The police had stepped up security at the church after Muslim youths began gathering in the area.
Egypt’s Coptic Christians, who make up about 10 percent of the country’s 85 million people, have long complained of discrimination by the state.
Under a heavy security presence, the town was quiet on Saturday, a security official said. The police said they had detained 15 people.
The political party of the Muslim Brotherhood, which helped elect President Mohamed Morsi, condemned the sectarian strife.
President Mohamed Morsi, elected last year with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood, has promised to protect the rights of Coptic Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s 83 million people.
Egyptian Christians fear that political tensions and a lack of security, along with hate speech by some ultraconservative Islamic clerics, might give extremists a freer hand to attack churches and Coptic property, especially in the country’s poorer areas.
“The sectarian riots which happened in Khusus are unacceptable and grave,” Saad el-Katatni, the leader of the Brotherhood’s political party, said on his Facebook page. “There are some who want to set Egypt ablaze and create crises.”
Sectarian tensions have often flared into violence, particularly in rural areas where rivalries between clans or families sometimes add to friction. Love affairs between Muslims and Christians have also set off clashes in the past.
Since Mr. Mubarak was ousted by a popular uprising, Christians have complained of several attacks on churches by radical Islamists, episodes that have sharpened longstanding Christian complaints about employment discrimination and biases written into laws.
As an example, they point to rules that make it harder to obtain official permission to build a church than a mosque.
Last month, a court sentenced a Muslim to death for killing two people in a dispute with Christians in a southern town.
