Egypt Army Denies Soldiers Killed Copt Christians

Egypt’s military stressed on Wednesday that troops did not kill protesters in a clash that killed 25 people, most of them Coptic Christians. Coptic witnesses said they were shot by soldiers when a march on Sunday turned violent and that several protesters were killed when military armored vehicles ran them over.

“Who killed them? We are still searching for the answer,” General Mahmud Hegazi of the country’s ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) said, according to AFP. “Did the armed forces kill them? Certainly not,” he said. A number of soldiers also died in the clashes, he stated.

Hegazi spoke of a plot by “enemies of the nation who want to abort the revolution.”

General Adel Umara, another SCAF member, denied that military vehicles ran down demonstrators. “This cannot be attributed to the armed forces, and this cannot be recorded in history, that the armed forces ran over people,” he said.