Amateur video: minutes after shooting of Coptic Christians

These amateur images were filmed just after a shooting which killed seven people, six of them Coptic Christians, in a town near Luxor, Upper Egypt.

Video posted by Wael Abbas on his blog Misr digital, Jan. 7 2010.

According to Wael Abbas, the blogger that posted the video, it was filmed by a doctor called Amjad Victor.

The shooting began when a group of Coptic Christians were exiting the main church in Nagaa Hamadi, (a government commune of Qena, around 700 km south of Cairo), where they had been attending Coptic Christmas mass. The scene took place at around 11.15pm. A group of people, as yet unidentified, arrived in a Fiat, a Peugeot and a minibus and opened fire on the churchgoers. According to Egyptian state news agency MENA, the church caretaker, who is allegedly of the Muslim faith, was also killed. Nine other Coptics were wounded.

According to security services, the shooting might be linked to the kidnapping of a 12-year-old Muslim girl by a Coptic man, who was accused of sexually abusing her, at the beginning of November last year. A few weeks afterwards, a few hundred Muslims gathered at the sentencing of the kidnapper and attempted to kill him when he was being escorted from the police car into the court. Coptic-run pharmacies in the area were then burnt down.

Some eight percent of the Egyptian population follows the Coptic faith, which celebrates Christmas on Jan. 7.