Egypt General Says Army Never Fires on People
Egyptian soldiers never fire on citizens and if they did use their weapons the results would be catastrophic, a military general said on Wednesday, days after deadly clashes with Christians.
"The armed forces cannot direct their fire at the people," General Mahmud Hegazi told a news conference days after the armed forces clashed with Coptic Christian protesters, leaving 25 people dead.
Over the weekend, 25 people were killed in Cairo in clashes between Muslims and mainly Copt Christians.
The Copts are the largest Christian minority community in the Middle East, and one of the oldest.
Vatican records show some 165,000 Catholic Copts lived in Egypt in 2010.
Weakly represented in government, Copts complain that they are sidelined in the community and suffer from very restrictive legislation on building churches, whereas the regime for building mosques is very liberal.
On January 1, 2011 the unclaimed bombing of a Coptic church killed 23 people in Egypt's second city of Alexandria.
In March, 13 people were killed in bloody clashes between Muslims and Copts and another 15 died in clashes in May.
Source: Agence France Presse
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