Egyptian Islamists Shoot Christian Man, Hack Body Into Pieces

WHEN a furious Muslim mob burst into the largely Christian area around his home in Minya, 150 miles south of Cairo, Alexander Tawss, 60, a barber, grabbed his gun and fired in the air to try to scare them away. 

It proved a fatal error. 

“They took offence at the fact that a Christian fired in the air against them, and they stormed his home and shot him to death before taking his body away and hacking it into parts,” Ayoub Youssef, 40, a Coptic Christian priest, said yesterday. 

Then the mob dumped Tawss’s remains in a graveyard. 

“We have not been able to visit the graveyard to collect his body parts and to this day he has not been given a burial,” Youssef said. 

The rampage in Minya, which started with the looting and destruction of a fifth- century monastery and the burning of Youssef’s church, was one of the most brutal of a series of attacks by Muslim Brotherhood supporters on Egypt’s 8m-strong Coptic community that has left Christians under siege. 

It came, said the priest, after imams took to minarets calling for jihad, following Wednesday’s crackdown in Cairo on supporters of Mohamed Morsi. Within minutes, 200-300 armed supporters of the Brotherhood, together with the more extreme salafist Islamists, attacked the monastery and church and set it ablaze.

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