Maspero massacre

Corpses of the murdered " Martyrs of October 9th"

A Muslim girl offers her condolences to her Christian friend after her brother was killed during the demonstration.

When Maspero demonstrations ( Egyptian Arabic مذبحة ماسبيرو) in October 2011, during a demonstration in front of the television building Maspero about 27 Coptic Christians in the Egyptian capital Cairo killed by an attack by the Egyptian security forces and 329 other Christians injured.

procedure

On October 9 and 10, 2011, a group of Egyptians, consisting mainly of Egyptian Copts , demonstrated against the destruction of a church in Upper Egypt . This act of vigilante justice was justified by the fact that the church was supposedly built without a building license.

The peaceful demonstrators, who intended to hold a sit-in in front of the Maspero TV building, were attacked by security forces and the Egyptian army , resulting in 28 of the demonstrators being killed. Another 329 people, most of them Christians , were seriously injured.

Both video footage and eyewitnesses indicated that the Egyptian army was responsible for the violent deaths of the protesters. The then ruling Supreme Military Council , however, denied that soldiers had used live ammunition against Coptic demonstrators in the Maspero massacre and that army vehicles deliberately rolled over protesting Christians. The researcher Emad Gad of the "al Ahram Center for Strategic Studies" stated that the events were war crimes .

Work-up

A dispute arose between the then ruling Supreme Military Council and Coptic youth organizations. The youth organizations demanded that civil courts and not military courts should be entrusted with the legal processing of the Copts massacre. An independent investigation into the massacre would not have been possible as military judges would not have indicted soldiers. The chief of the Supreme Military Council, Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi , finally agreed to have the bloodbath investigated by civilian judges.

It was criticized that the Egyptian leadership “turned the victims into perpetrators” in order to “wash away all guilt”. On Monday, February 4, 2013, two Christians were sentenced to three years in prison in connection with the Maspero massacre in Cairo. A criminal court found the two men guilty of allegedly stealing a machine gun during the clashes in 2011 .

See also

• Persecution of the Copts
• Attack on the churches of Imbaba
• Terrorist attack on January 1, 2011 in Alexandria
• Attack on Saint Joseph's Cathedral in Baghdad in 2010

Web links

• S Carr: A firsthand account: Marching from Shubra to deaths at Maspero . In: alMasry alYoum , October 9, 2011. Retrieved October 11, 2011. 
• Zeinab El Gundy: “Outrage over state TV's misinformation and anti-Coptic incitement” , al-Ahram -Online. October 10, 2011.
• Human Rights Watch : “Egypt: Don't Cover Up Military Killing of Copt Protesters” . October 15, 2011.
• Yassin Gaber: Reconstructing Maspero's Bloody Sunday: An Ahram Online investigation , Ahram Online. November 1, 2011.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} epo.de ( Memento from July 13, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Coptic massacre is being investigated by civil justice. November 24, 2011, archived from the original on May 12, 2012 ; Retrieved July 12, 2013 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b} Cairo: Two Copts sentenced after the Maspero massacre. February 4, 2013, accessed July 12, 2013 . 
4. ↑ Cairo clashes leave 24 dead after Coptic church protest . In: BBC , October 9, 2011. Retrieved October 11, 2011. 
5. ^ M. Michael: Christians Under Siege in Post-Revolution Egypt . In: AP , October 9, 2011. Retrieved October 11, 2011.