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By Hala Abdel Aziz
SOHAG, Egypt, June 4 (AFP)-Ninety-six people went on trial here Sunday for their alleged role in the New Year's massacre of a Muslim and 20 Christians in a rural Nile Valley town in southern Egypt. Under heavy police guard and with armored vehicles outside, 89 defendants appeared in Sohag criminal court, while the seven others were being tried in their absence because they have not been arrested yet. Only a few family members of the defendants - Muslim and Christians kept in separate cages - were allowed to attend the proceedings, which lasted less than two hours before the case was adjourned until August 7. Thirty-eight of the defendants, all of them Muslims, face execution if convicted of the charges of premeditated murder during the January 2 violence in the town of Kosheh, 550 kilometers (330 miles) south of the capital, Cairo. The remainder faced charges of attempted murder, armed robbery, destruction of public property, illegal assembly, and illegal possession of weapons. Thirty-three of them are Coptic Christians. Many villages in upper Egypt have large proportions of Copts, who account for around six percent of Egypt's mainly Muslim population of 65 million. Hundreds of Kosheh residents, most of them Muslims, gathered outside the courthouse in Sohag, which is around 50 kilometers north of Kosheh. The trial is the second to open in Sohag in two days concerning the clashes that first broke out between a Muslim and a Coptic merchant, as the rest of the world was celebrating the new millennium. On Saturday, 39 people went on trial in the same court for a spillover riot in the neighboring town of Dar al-Salam that erupted hours after the Kosheh massacre on January 2 and left five people injured. The trial for the events in Dar al-Salam was meanwhile adjourned until July 3 to permit additional judicial investigations. Officials said tension first erupted December 31 in Kosheh, a mainly Christian town of 35,000 people, following a quarrel between a Christian merchant and a Muslim customer over a piece of cloth. The tension spiraled into full-scale rioting and gunfire two days later, with market stalls and shops burned and Christians killed. The Muslim was reported killed when a fleeing car hit him. The authorities have tried to play down the sectarian aspect of the violence, claiming the clashes had no link to religion and were the result of a simple trade dispute. |
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