A Muslim policeman shot dead an Egyptian Christian on a train on Tuesday and wounded five, sources said, less than two weeks after a church was bombed in Egypt’s deadliest attack on Christians in years.
The shooting is likely to stoke tension in the Muslim majority country, where Christians protested for several days after the January 1 bombing of a church in Alexandria that killed as many as 23 people.
Christians make up a tenth of Egypt’s 79 million people and have long complained of unfair treatment. They have accused the government of not doing enough to protect them.
Mariam Salah, a doctor in Minya, south of the capital, told Reuters her hospital is treating five wounded Christians. She said one of them told her a sixth Christian was shot dead.
A security source confirmed one Christian had been shot dead and said the attacker was a Muslim police officer.
An Interior Ministry statement named the attacker as Officer Amer Ashour Abdel Zaher, a name that suggests he is a Muslim.
It also named the man killed and the five wounded, saying one of those injured is the dead man’s wife. The husband and wife were from Cairo and the others from Minya. At least two of the names indicated they are Christians.
The Interior Ministry said the suspect boarded a train and “opened fire on some train passengers from his pistol and ran away”. It said the perpetrator was caught at his home and an investigation is under way.
The official news agency said the train was travelling between Cairo and Assiut in southern Egypt.
The January 1 church bombing was not typical of the kind of sectarian violence that sometimes erupts over issues such as building churches and romantic relationships between members of the two religions.
Local rows or vendettas between families from the two communities have sometimes flared up into attacks or even shootings, particularly in southern Egypt.
Early last year, six Christians, as well as a Muslim policeman, were killed in a drive-by shooting at a church.
Egypt’s Christians have long complained that they receive unfair treatment, pointing to laws such as those that make it easier to build a mosque than a church. The government insists that all citizens are treated equally.
In response to the January 1 church bombing, the head of the world’s Roman Catholics, Pope Benedict, called for more effective steps to protect Christian minorities in Egypt and other predominantly Muslim countries where attacks had happened.
In a statement on Tuesday, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the pope’s statement as “unacceptable interference” in its affairs and recalled its Vatican ambassador back to Cairo for consultation.
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