CAIRO (AP) – An Egyptian criminal court has acquitted three Muslim men accused of undressing a Coptic Christian woman and marching her on 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 prison in January before being detained and were on trial for the attack in southern Minya province, where an armed Muslim mob attacked the woman 70 years ago. years later, 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 as the trial of the three ended on Thursday.
Egypt’s chief prosecutor, Hamada el-Sawy, on Friday instructed his legal team to consider a possible appeal, MENA news agency reported.
The May 2016 attack shocked the country. At the time, Anba Makarios, Minya’s top Christian cleric, told a talk show host on the private Dream TV network that the woman had been dragged from home by the mob that beat and insulted her Before they stripped her of her clothes and she walked the streets chanting Allahu Akbar or “God is great.”
It also caused a storm of condemnation on social networks, where users blamed the incident of strong influence in the area of ultra-conservative Muslims known as Salafis. In the same eruption of sectarian violence, seven Christian houses were looted and set on fire in the village of Minya in Karma.
Christians, who make up nearly 10 percent of Egypt’s population of more than 100 million, have long complained of discrimination by the Muslim majority.
Also on Friday, the European Parliament adopted a resolution condemning Egypt’s “deteriorating” human rights conditions. The resolution was due to the decision of Italian prosecutors to officially investigate four high-ranking members of the Egyptian security forces for the abduction, torture and murder in 2016 of Italian student Giulio Regeni in Egypt.
The Egyptian parliament promptly denounced the resolution as unacceptable. The measure accuses the Egyptian authorities of “deceiving” and “impeding” the progress of the investigation and called on EU member states to pressure Egypt to cooperate with the Italian judicial authorities to allow a formal indictment of the four suspects. However, such resolutions of the European Parliament are of little significance, as foreign affairs are left to each Member State.
Since last month, Egyptian prosecutors have insisted that Regeni’s killer remains unknown. Authorities said the Cambridge University doctoral student had fallen victim to ordinary robbers.
The EU parliament’s resolution also listed a set of human rights violations in Egypt last year and condemned the recent crackdown on the Egyptian Personal Rights Initiative, one of the few remaining defense groups in the country.