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CBC News, Saturday, January 1, 2011 | 9:27 AM ET

At least 21 people are dead and nearly 80 wounded after a bomb exploded outside a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, Egypt, early Saturday.

Officials believe a suicide bomber attacked as worshippers were leaving a New Year's Eve mass.

The Interior Ministry said the wounded included eight Muslims from a mosque across the street from the Saints Church.

Several hundred Christians protested the bombing, attacking the mosque, burning cars and clashing with police.

The blast came from a car parked outside the church, but police were still investigating whether the car had been rigged with explosives or a bomb had been placed under it.

Witnesses reported seeing the charred chassis of the car, with the remains of several bodies nearby and dozens wounded.

The protesters stormed into the mosque, throwing books out onto the street. The protest sparked clashes with Muslims, as both sides began throwing stones and bottles at each other in the street.

New clashes erupted later in the day as young Christian men hurled stones in the streets outside the church. Witnesses say several protesters were struck by rubber bullets fired by riot police.

The attack outside the church comes at a time of rising sectarian tension in Egypt and the broader region.

(snip)

Christians are believed to make up about 10 per cent of Egypt's mainly Muslim population of nearly 80 million, and are increasingly protesting acts of discrimination.



http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2011/01/0 ... mbing.html
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suicide bomber in a parked car with a bomb under it? hmm...

p.s. Alice if you're still reading hang in there and best wishes for a new year that is already looking too familiar, likewise to all at RI.

Has anyone head from Alice? I pray she's alright.

Iamwhomiam wrote:Has anyone head from Alice? I pray she's alright.

Same here! Alice, PLEASE check in.

Thank you, I'm fine. I was nowhere near Alexandria last night.

Sincere best wishes for a happy new year, a turning point for the better, for all of us chickens. And may the foxes all fall in traps of their own making, in 2011 and beyond.

Very glad to hear you're ok, Alice.

Perhaps wishing for a "happy" new year is too much to ask for. Let's hope this year will be no worse than last. If you can find happiness this year you will be fortunate.

Yes, thanks for letting us know Alice, I was a little worried myself. Very glad to hear you weren't there but it's a horrible thing nonetheless and no way to start the year. It isn't hard to imagine who planted the bomb and I'm not talking about any single agency. Anyway stay well and please know that your contributions here are always keenly appreciated!

Happy New Year Alice. Good to hear you're OK.

Hope you and your family have a great year, and a great Christmas on Friday.

AlicetheKurious wrote:Thank you, I'm fine. I was nowhere near Alexandria last night.

Sincere best wishes for a happy new year, a turning point for the better, for all of us chickens. And may the foxes all fall in traps of their own making, in 2011 and beyond.

Thank goodness Alice!

Happy New Year.

...and what do you know, I was right:

Egypt arrests church blast suspects
Al Jazeera and agencies, 02 Jan 2011 13:27 GMT

Egyptian police have arrested 17 people suspected of involvement in the bombing of a Coptic Christian church that killed at least 21 people, security sources say.

Sunday's announcement came as congregants were back praying in al-Qiddissine [The Saints] church, targeted the day before by a car bomb that also wounded 97 people.

Dozens of worshippers attended Sunday Mass at the church, located in the Sidi Bechr district of the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, while riot police backed by armoured vehicles were deployed outside.

The service was marked by the grief and anger felt by a congregation devastated by the attack, which took place on Saturday outside the church's door about 30 minutes into the New Year.

Many wept while others cried hysterically, screamed in anger or slapped themselves.

"We spend every feast in grief," Sohair Fawzy, who lost two sisters and a niece in the attack, said.

Grim reminders of the attack remained in the church a day after the bombing. Its ground floor was stained with the blood of victims brought inside immediately after the attack.

Two statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary were toppled and the benches were scattered by the impact of the blast. And a "2011" sign hung on the inside of the church's door was torn apart.

The attack was the worst violence against Egypt's Christian minority in a decade.

It sparked clashes between riot police and Christians who say the government hasn't done enough to protect them.

The Copts are the biggest Christian community in the Middle East and account for up to 10 per cent of Egypt's 80 million population.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing, which came as nearly 1,000 faithful left al-Qiddissine church.

According to the Egyptian interior ministry, the car that exploded was parked in front of the church.

After the blast, enraged Christians emerging from the church fought with police and stormed a nearby mosque.

Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin, reporting from the Egyptian capital Cairo, said that the car bomb probably involved sophisticated remote-control timer technology.

"Churches in Egypt are heavily guarded, so undoubtedly questions will arise about how a car was parked so close to the church and who was able to detonate it from a distance," he said. And undoubtedly they won't be answered.

While it was not known who was responsible for the blast, a group calling itself "al-Qaeda in Iraq" had threatened the country's Coptic Christian community. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq," check.

The Egyptian interior ministry blamed the bombing on "foreign elements". No shit. Bombing churches is as American as the KKK.

Adel Labib, Alexandria's governor, has linked the attack to al-Qaida, but our correspondent says the government has not made clear who they were blaming for the bombing.

Egypt's government has long insisted that the terror network does not have a significant presence in the country, and it has never been conclusively linked to any attacks here.

The attack in Egypt prompted Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican to call for Christians throughout the Middle East to be protected.

The bombing comes almost two months to the day after an October 31 attack by Muslim fighters on Our Lady of Salvation church in central Baghdad, which left 44 worshippers, two priests and seven security forces members dead.

Al-Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate claimed responsibility for that attack and made new threats against Christians. Exactamundo.

The group threatened to attack Egyptian Copts if their church did not free two Christians it said had been "imprisoned in their monasteries" for having converted to Islam.

The two women were Camilia Chehata and Wafa Constantine, the wives of Coptic priests whose claimed conversion caused a stir in Egypt.

Protection around Copt places of worship was discreetly stepped up after the threats, as Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, said he was committed to protecting the Christians "faced with the forces of terrorism and extremism".

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middl ... 37362.html
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I had a feeling this was an "al Quaeda" job, not that it's particularly hard to figure out.

AlicetheKurious wrote:Thank you, I'm fine. I was nowhere near Alexandria last night.

Sincere best wishes for a happy new year, a turning point for the better, for all of us chickens. And may the foxes all fall in traps of their own making, in 2011 and beyond.

I am very relieved to know you are ok !

Searcher08 wrote:

AlicetheKurious wrote:Thank you, I'm fine. I was nowhere near Alexandria last night.

Sincere best wishes for a happy new year, a turning point for the better, for all of us chickens. And may the foxes all fall in traps of their own making, in 2011 and beyond.

I am very relieved to know you are ok. Stay safe!
It frankly sent a bit of a chill down my spine when I heard of the bomb - moves things from the realm of the Forum and discussions into very real life...

AlicetheKurious wrote:Thank you, I'm fine. I was nowhere near Alexandria last night.

Sincere best wishes for a happy new year, a turning point for the better, for all of us chickens. And may the foxes all fall in traps of their own making, in 2011 and beyond.

Thank you and happy new year to you too!

J’accuse

Hani Shukrallah , Saturday 1 Jan 2011

Hypocrisy and good intentions will not stop the next massacre. Only a good hard look at ourselves and sufficient resolve to face up to the ugliness in our midst will do so

We are to join in a chorus of condemnation. Jointly, Muslims and Christians, government and opposition, Church and Mosque, clerics and laypeople – all of us are going to stand up and with a single voice declare unequivocal denunciation of al-Qaeda, Islamist militants, and Muslim fanatics of every shade, hue and color; some of us will even go the extra mile to denounce salafi Islam, Islamic fundamentalism as a whole, and the Wahabi Islam which, presumably, is a Saudi import wholly alien to our Egyptian national culture.

And once again we’re going to declare the eternal unity of “the twin elements of the nation”, and hearken back the Revolution of 1919, with its hoisted banner showing the crescent embracing the cross, and giving symbolic expression to that unbreakable bond.

Much of it will be sheer hypocrisy; a great deal of it will be variously nuanced so as keep, just below the surface, the heaps of narrow-minded prejudice, flagrant double standard and, indeed, bigotry that holds in its grip so many of the participants in the condemnations.

All of it will be to no avail. We’ve been here before; we’ve done exactly that, yet the massacres continue, each more horrible than the one before it, and the bigotry and intolerance spread deeper and wider into every nook and cranny of our society. It is not easy to empty Egypt of its Christians; they’ve been here for as long as there has been Christianity in the world. Close to a millennium and half of Muslim rule did not eradicate the nation’s Christian community, rather it maintained it sufficiently strong and sufficiently vigorous so as to play a crucial role in shaping the national, political and cultural identity of modern Egypt.

Yet now, two centuries after the birth of the modern Egyptian nation state, and as we embark on the second decade of the 21stcentury, the previously unheard of seems no longer beyond imagining: a Christian-free Egypt, one where the cross will have slipped out of the crescent’s embrace, and off the flag symbolizing our modern national identity. I hope that if and when that day comes I will have been long dead, but dead or alive, this will be an Egypt which I do not recognize and to which I have no desire to belong.

I am no Zola, but I too can accuse. And it’s not the blood thirsty criminals of al-Qaeda or whatever other gang of hoodlums involved in the horror of Alexandria that I am concerned with.

I accuse a government that seems to think that by outbidding the Islamists it will also outflank them.

I accuse the host of MPs and government officials who cannot help but take their own personal bigotries along to the parliament, or to the multitude of government bodies, national and local, from which they exercise unchecked, brutal yet at the same time hopelessly inept authority.

I accuse those state bodies who believe that by bolstering the Salafi trend they are undermining the Muslim Brotherhood, and who like to occasionally play to bigoted anti-Coptic sentiments, presumably as an excellent distraction from other more serious issues of government.

But most of all, I accuse the millions of supposedly moderate Muslims among us; those who’ve been growing more and more prejudiced, inclusive and narrow minded with every passing year.

I accuse those among us who would rise up in fury over a decision to halt construction of a Muslim Center near ground zero in New York, but applaud the Egyptian police when they halt the construction of a staircase in a Coptic church in the Omranya district of Greater Cairo.

I’ve been around, and I have heard you speak, in your offices, in your clubs, at your dinner parties: “The Copts must be taught a lesson,” “the Copts are growing more arrogant,” “the Copts are holding secret conversions of Muslims”, and in the same breath, “the Copts are preventing Christian women from converting to Islam, kidnapping them, and locking them up in monasteries.”

I accuse you all, because in your bigoted blindness you cannot even see the violence to logic and sheer common sense that you commit; that you dare accuse the whole world of using a double standard against us, and are, at the same time, wholly incapable of showing a minimum awareness of your own blatant double standard.

And finally, I accuse the liberal intellectuals, both Muslim and Christian who, whether complicit, afraid, or simply unwilling to do or say anything that may displease “the masses”, have stood aside, finding it sufficient to join in one futile chorus of denunciation following another, even as the massacres spread wider, and grow more horrifying.

A few years ago I wrote in the Arabic daily Al-Hayat, commenting on a columnist in one of the Egyptian papers. The columnist, whose name I’ve since forgotten, wrote lauding the patriotism of an Egyptian Copt who had himself written saying that he would rather be killed at the hands of his Muslim brethren than seek American intervention to save him.

Addressing myself to the patriotic Copt, I simply asked him the question: where does his willingness for self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation stop. Giving his own life may be quite a noble, even laudable endeavor, but is he also willing to give up the lives of his children, wife, mother? How many Egyptian Christians, I asked him, are you willing to sacrifice before you call upon outside intervention, a million, two, three, all of them?

Our options, I said then and continue to say today are not so impoverished and lacking in imagination and resolve that we are obliged to choose between having Egyptian Copts killed, individually or en masse, or run to Uncle Sam. Is it really so difficult to conceive of ourselves as rational human beings with a minimum of backbone so as to act to determine our fate, the fate of our nation?

That, indeed, is the only option we have before us, and we better grasp it, before it’s too late.

Link.

Who is really behind the Alexandria Church attack !!??

Last night after the attack by couple of hours people have started to accuse foreign parties.

Here are a list with the two main suspects mentioned day and night :

Al Qaeda secret cell in Egypt :

Based on the threats Al Qaeda related Iraqi terrorist group issued from two months ago to the Egyptian Orthodox Church.It already re-issued that the threat from two weeks ago.

Based on the fact that the address of the “Two saints” church was mentioned in a list of churches in Egypt to be attacked during the Christmas in Egypt if the church does not comply to the demands of the group at a forum related to Al Qaeda.

Based on the fact that that forum claims now responsibility for the attack.

There was a Salafi protest Friday morning calling the state to search the churches for weapons.

The Israeli Mossad :

Despite some consider it ridiculous , yet many fingers are pointing to our neighbor and its intelligence services including indirect official

Israel can be angry for exposing not only their kung Fu spy but rather their important golden spy in Damascus and their agents in Lebanon , do not underestimate the blow the Mossad suffered in Damascus.

The statements of Aviv Kohavi that Israel since 1979 managed to destabilize Egypt especially from sectarian level that any president after Mubarak will be able to stabilize Egypt. “According to their own point of view”

This would not be the first time Israel would launch a covert operations to destabilize Egypt , we got the Lavon affair as a real live example.

Israel will not rest except turning Egypt in another Lebanon or Sudan or Yemen.

Israel is using the Al Qaeda puppet to destroy Iraq and Egypt.

Of course thanks to the Shark conspiracy theory and our official bad record in lying, people around the world may disbelieve this theory even if it is true.

Some people I know believe that the regime is behind that act based on the following facts :

Mubarak needs a good reason to apply the emergency laws again in this critical year for him and his son.

He needs to remind the West that he protects the Christians from crazy Islamist radicals.

Why there was not enough protection for that Church compared to other Churches last night !!?? Why the security let that green car to be parked at that church where it does not allow cars to be parked at other churches especially in this feasts season !!??

Why did this Church in particular !!?

The security failure in protecting the citizens is more than suspicious.
Believe or not I think all theories are logic despite how mad they are.

The MOI believes that it is a suicide bomber act not a car bomb , the green car was used to transfer the suicide bomber because if it had the bomb , it would be completely damaged. I do not know how they can confirm the suicide bomber theory thought because logically his body will be gone with the wind.

According to security experts this is the second operation where suicide bombers are being used in Egypt , it happened in 1990s I think in an attempt to kill the minister of interior. If it was a car bomb , it will be the first in Egypt.

Links in original.