Three men have been arrested in relation to a sectarian mob attack on the homes of Coptic Christians in the Egyptian province of Minya.
The arrests bring to 14 the number of people arrested since the May 20 attack, in which the most serious incident involved an elderly Coptic woman being stripped naked, abused and insulted in public. Egyptian media reported that up to 300 people were involved in this.
The perpetrators of that incident are likely to remain unpunished, because the main witness changed his version of the facts after some of his family members were themselves blamed for attacks on Copts.
The province’s outbreak of sectarian violence followed rumours of a love affair between a Christian man and a Muslim woman; it is understood that the woman who was brutalised was the man’s mother.