Libyan militants still holding 20 Egyptian Christians hostages
By Michael Ireland, Senior Reporter, ASSIST News Service answritermike@gmail.com
(ANS-SIRTE, LIBYA, Jan.26, 2015) --
The kidnapping of at least 20 Coptic Christians in two separate
incidents in December and January has been claimed by Libyan militants
affiliated with the self-proclaimed Islamic State, otherwise known as
ISIS.
Barbara G. Baker, writing for
World Watch Monitor, says seven of the Christians were abducted on Dec.
29 while driving by car back to Egypt from the coastal city of Sirte,
currently under the control of the Libya Dawn alliance of Islamist
militants. Another 13 Copts were seized Jan. 3 in Sirte by armed men who
raided the building where they lived. The attackers checked the men’s
Egyptian I.D. papers, taking hostage those who were Christians and
letting the Muslims go free.
“We were afraid to go out
because we might be targeted,” said Mila Ishak, 27, who had been living
in the same housing compound in Sirte as the kidnap victims. At about
2:30 a.m. on Jan. 3, he told World Watch Monitor, he received a
cell-phone call from a friend who occupied a room in an adjacent
building.
The friend, Ishak said, “called
me again and with fear and a low voice, told me that they were able to
break the door of the room beside his room, and had abducted all their
six friends who were inside the room.” Ishak said the intruders tried to
break into the room from which his friend was calling, but gave up and
left.
Then the intruders entered the
building where Ishak lived. He said he heard one of them command another
resident of the building, who was up at that hour, to “show them the
rooms of the Christians in the building,” and to rouse the men sleeping
inside. The man pounded on the door where seven men, all Christians,
were sleeping.
“I was hearing everything,”
Ishak said. “One of the seven residents of the room . . . awoke and
opened the iron door of the room. They entered the room and abducted all
of them too.”
Next, he said, came the
pounding on the door to his own room. But as there were only three pairs
of shoes outside his door, compared to the seven pairs outside the
first room, one of the intruders said “leave them. That is enough. Let’s
go.”
Ishak said he and 10 others paid a Libyan smugger to get them back into Egypt on Jan. 5.
In her report, Baker says that
photos of all 20 kidnapped Copts were posted on an official ISIS website
on Jan. 12. Their faces have all been identified by relatives in their
home villages in Upper Egypt’s Minya province. None of the families have
been contacted by the kidnappers. Although Egyptian officials say they
are communicating with the Libyan authorities, the government has only
confirmed that the men are still alive.
Baker writes that several
relatives of the kidnapped men told World Watch Monitor their pleas to
Egyptian authorities have gone nowhere.
“Two weeks (have) passed since
the time of their abduction and the foreign ministry hasn't done
anything to help us,” said Hany Adly, whose brother, Gaber, was among
the seven men abducted Dec. 29. “We haven't seen any positive step from
them.”
Baker’s report explains that as
many as 1.5 million Egyptian workers remain caught in the chaotic
fighting between warring factions in Libya, where an internationally
recognized government in Tobruk in the east is locked in conflict with a
rival government in Tripoli in the west. On Jan. 25, the Ansar
al-Sharia group based in eastern Libya confirmed the death of its
leader, Mohammad al-Zahawi, injured last October while battling
government troops in Bengazi. Militias allied with Tripoli accuse Egypt
of supporting the Tobruk side, although Cairo denies military
involvement.
But Egypt’s Coptic Christians
have been particularly targeted recently, Baker writes. On Dec. 23, two
Coptic doctors in Sirte were shot to death in their home in front of
their two small children. Their teenage daughter’s bullet-riddled body
was found in the desert several days later.
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