CAIRO, Egypt — The Egyptian military launched a series of attacks against a Christian farm in the Suez desert just east of Cairo during February, injuring several staff members and inflicting considerable property damage on the Coptic-owned Patmos Center for handicapped children.
On February 19, army officers and soldiers bulldozed a 25-meter section of the compound wall and began uprooting trees along the property boundaries. The assault was only halted when civil police and state security officers summoned from Heliopolis arrived at the scene.
The Patmos Center has a case stalled in the Egyptian courts for nearly five years now, to recover extensive damages inflicted in similar army attacks in 1996 and 1997. Coptic sources confirmed on March 5 that the office of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had intervened in the case a few days earlier, on the eve of Mubarak’s visit to Washington, D.C., promising to “end the issue” without any further problems for the Christian center.
During the past 20 years, Egyptian authorities have been accused by human rights observers of being lax in protecting Coptic Christians, who compose at least 10 percent of the population.
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