CAIRO (AP) – An Egyptian criminal judge acquitted three Muslim men accused of stripping an elderly Coptic Christian woman naked and parading her through the streets of a village in southern Egypt in 2016, the state’s official news agency reported. .
The three were sentenced to 10 years in absentia in January, before being detained and retrial for the attack in southern Minya province, where an armed Muslim mob attacked the 70-year-old woman four years ago. rumors spread that her son was having an affair with a Muslim woman. Such relationships are taboo in conservative Egypt.
The court handed down the verdict when the three thursday retrial closed.
Egypt’s chief prosecutor, Hamada el-Sawy, ordered his legal team on Friday to investigate a possible appeal, state news agency MENA reported.
The attack in May 2016 shocked the country. At the time, Anba Makarios, Minya’s foremost Christian clergyman, told a talk show host on the Dream TV private network that the woman was dragged out of her home by the mob who beat and insulted her before pulling her out and allowed her to walk the streets while they chanted Allahu Akbar, or “God is great.”
It also sparked a storm of condemnation on social media, with users blaming the incident for the strong influence on the field of ultra-conservative Muslims known as Salafists. In the same outbreak of sectarian violence, seven Christian homes were looted and set on fire in the Minya village of Karma.
Christians, who make up nearly 10% of Egypt’s population of more than 100 million, have long complained of discrimination by the Muslim majority.
Also on Friday, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning the “deteriorating” human rights situation in Egypt. The resolution came on the heels of Italian prosecutors’ decision to formally investigate four senior members of the Egyptian security forces for the kidnapping, torture and murder of 28-year-old Italian student Giulio Regeni in Egypt in 2016.
The Egyptian parliament promptly condemned the resolution as unacceptable. The measure accuses the Egyptian authorities of ‘misleading’ and ‘obstructing’ the progress of the investigation and called on EU member states to pressure Egypt to cooperate with the Italian judicial authorities to bring a formal charge against the four suspects as possible. However, such resolutions of the European Parliament have little significance, as foreign affairs are left to each Member State.
Last month, Egyptian prosecutors insisted that Regeni’s killer remains unknown. Authorities have claimed that the Cambridge University PhD candidate has been the victim of common robbers.
The EU parliament resolution also listed a series of human rights violations registered in Egypt since last year and condemned the recent crackdown on the Egyptian Personal Rights Initiative, one of the country’s few remaining advocacy groups.