Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia 17 June 2025
al-kosheḥ massacre
William Weessa Keywords: al-Balyana; Christian martyrs; Contemporary Coptic martyrs; al-Kosheḥ Massacre; Martyrs, Coptic; Persecution; Pope Shenouda iii; Al‑Zāwiyah al‑Ḥamrāʼ massacre.
On 2 January 2000, twenty-one Coptic Christians were victims of a massacre in al-Kosheḥ (al-Kocheḥ) village, located in the al-balyana district in the Sohag governorate in Upper Egypt, 450 km south of Cairo, following a Sunday liturgy.1 This massacre was a horrific event, followed by an equally horrific lack of justice for its victims.
In 2000, just before the massacre, the population of al-Kosheḥ was around 40,000. It was one of the very few villages with a majority Christian population; at the time, it was made up of 70 percent Christians and 30 percent Muslims. Christians worked in commerce, industry, and various other professions. They owned the majority of al-Kosheḥ’s stores and half of its agricultural land. Muslims generally worked as farmers.
People from nearby villages came to shop in al-Kosheḥ, which bustled with trade in grains and other foodstuffs, textiles, and building materials such as cement and steel. Al-Kosheḥ’s population worked in diverse trades, including tinkering, casting, and mechanical workshops. There were also plumbers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and electricians. It was more like a small city than a village. Because al-Kosheḥ was predominantly Coptic, the Egyptian government neglected its development and began investing in a nearby smaller village called Awlad Tuk in the 1970s, renaming it Dar al-Salam City (Weessa 2004: chapter 1).
Members of the Muslim Brotherhood used to call al-Kosheḥ “Tel Aviv”—which they meant as an insult—due to their extreme hatred of its Christian majority (Weessa 2004: 22). This heinous ideology poisoned the hearts of al-Kosheḥ’s Muslims. The perpetrators of the al-Kosheḥ massacre were not from terrorist organizations, or other groups that consistently legitimized killing Egyptian Christians and looted their properties, as had been the case since 1970s, but were their ordinary Muslim neighbors.
Prelude to the Massacre In August 1998, some Muslims in the village killed two of their Coptic neighbors. This happened not long after a major terrorist attack in Luxor in November 1997, in which 58 tourists were killed. Egyptian security forces, fearing that the crime would be considered a terrorist act by the international community, tried to find a Christian whom they could blame as the killer.2 For weeks, the security forces went on a rampage and arbitrarily detained and tortured hundreds of Copts in the village to extract false confessions.3 When those who were tortured by the police dared to file complaints, security forces started a belligerent standoff with the local Coptic clergymen, and particularly Bishop Wissa of al-Balyana,4 who had backed the torture victims and thus defied the security forces.
The police eventually made a false accusation against William Shaiboub Arsal,5 who was convicted in a trial for the murders he did not commit and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison on 11 June 2000. When President Hosni Mubarak later issued a decree in September 2013 to © Claremont Graduate University 1 W. Weessa: Al-Kosheḥ Massacre 17 June 2025 release him, after he had served three-quarters of his term, Arsal was arrested again at the door of the prison and accused of being “a threat to public security.” He died from illness in prison one month later. The court did not even try to investigate the accusations made by the families of the two murder victims against the real killers and refused to review any of the complaints of torture submitted by some of the tortured villagers against the security forces.
The Egyptian state was nevertheless shaken by reports in the foreign press and by foreign governments (see, for example, United States Department of State 1999) about the allegations of torture in al-Kosheḥ. Typically, the state proceeded to deny what had really happened, to justify any mistakes, and to evoke conspiracy theories.
The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (eohr) published a report in Arabic on the tortures,6 which was also published in English by the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph,7 but both the Egyptian media and the government issued their standard denials. Four days after the publication of the Sunday Telegraph report on human rights abuses in al-Kosheḥ, Egyptian authorities arrested the eohr secretary general, Hafez Abu Saeda, and filed a case against him in the supreme state security court on charges of spreading false information.8 Even the stance of the so-called opposition was congruent with that of the majority in the People’s Assembly (the Egyptian parliament): there was no condemnation of the tortures of al-Kosheḥ’s Christians, and there were no calls for the establishment of any kind of fact-finding commission.
The Massacre and its Aftermath Sixteen months later, on 1 January 2000, tensions in the village peaked. Some Muslims9 attacked a Coptic cloth merchant who had refused to agree to an installment plan for a Muslim customer who had failed to make payments before. The customer returned with his brothers and beat the Christian merchant in the sight of security officers, who were stationed only meters away. Some Copts became furious with the police who had failed to stop the beating or to arrest the perpetrators. At the same time, around fifteen people, thought to be radical Muslims, came from outside of the village and opened fire on Coptic shopkeepers.
In addition, an unfounded rumor spread—probably initiated by a radical Muslim organization—that some Christians had poisoned the waters and had set the al-Azhar Institute10 on fire. The following day, on Sunday 2 January, a massacre was launched just after the Sunday liturgy.
Many of al-Kosheḥ’s Muslims started attacking the houses of their Coptic neighbors, setting them on fire, and killing Coptic farmers on their farms.
Within a few hours, 21 Copts were killed in al-Kosheḥ. Christians’ homes and shops were ransacked, burned, and destroyed, not only in al-Kosheḥ, but also in a few neighboring villages, with Dar al-Salam particularly hard hit.11 The extraordinary brutality of these attacks was a dangerous indicator of the terrible acts humans can commit when possessed by malice and fanaticism and when they refuse to accept others’ beliefs, thinking themselves the sole possessors of the whole truth. The murderers revealed their hate of the “other,” both non-Muslims in general, whom they considered to be nonbelievers, and of al-Kosheḥ’s Christian majority in particular, through these awful crimes. The massacre also revealed the devastating failure of Egyptian authorities and the main national institutions (i.e., the executive, legislative, and judicial bodies), first, to have addressed problems prior to violent attacks, and second, to address the crimes committed during the massacre itself.
© Claremont Graduate University 2 W. Weessa: Al-Kosheḥ Massacre 17 June 2025 These crimes took place in full view of policemen who were summoned by the thousands from neighboring governorates 24 hours prior to the massacre. Those forces withdrew, strangely, from the village when the first shot was fired on 2 January, and they did not return with their armored cars until after the massacre ended. The situation recalled an even worse massacre that took place nineteen years earlier in al‑Zāwiyah al‑Ḥamrāʼ during which the police similarly did not intervene for three days, thus giving the attackers a free hand to kill more Copts.12 While international news agencies broadcast that 21 Copts had been killed in al-Kosheḥ, Safwat al-Sherif, Egypt’s information minister at the time, declared that only two Copts had been killed, in a conflict described as being between extremists from the two sides.13 Only one week later did the Egyptian government recognize the attacks as being only toward Copts as well as correcting the number of victims.
Pope Shenouda iii strongly criticized the Egyptian authorities, police, judicial system, and media in an article in al-Kiraza Magazine, the official weekly of the Coptic Orthodox Church, titled “Our Martyrs in al-Kosheh.” The pope explained the violence and murders of the 2000 massacre in the al-Kosheḥ region and its subsequent coverup in detail, quoting eyewitnesses, including his own personal envoy, over three pages (Shenouda 2000: 1–3). He begins his article by addressing the increasing violence against Copts which culminated in the massacre: Frankly, we say the attempt to cover up what happened in al-Kosheh a year and a half ago (in August 1998), by exonerating the wrongdoers and accusing the injured, has led to a recurrence of the problem in a more hideous manner, and escalating violent aggression into murder. (Shenouda 2000: 1, reproduced in Weessa 2004:
doc. 20, p. 452) After the massacre, eohr sent a commission to al-Kosheḥ to investigate. As the Egyptian authorities increased the pressure on eohr, Hafez Abu Saeda fled to Paris.
In Paris, Zakaria Azmy, the Secretary General to the Presidency of the Republic, and Fathy Sorour, the Speaker of the People’s Assembly, met with Abu Saeda. They made him an offer for his return to Egypt, provided there would be no publication of the massacre report, and then the case against him would be dropped.14 The position of the Egyptian government toward Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Professor of Sociology at the American University in Cairo and Director of the Ibn Khaldun Center, was similarly aligned with its stance toward Hafez Abu Saeda, due to his positions in defense of minorities, including the Copts. He was arrested and put on trial on charges of tarnishing Egypt’s reputation abroad (Weessa 2004: 237–245). While in prison, before being released under American pressure, he wrote an article referencing the al-Kosheḥ massacre, which he sent to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Wafd. It included the following:
In liberal Egypt—whether the Wafd Party was in power or not—such sectarian convulsions would never have surfaced in such an ugly manner, as we have begun to witness regularly since the al-Khanka incident in 1972, culminating in al-Kosheh in 2000. Between the first and the last, there have been sixty sectarian incidents. As long as the “Coptic file” remains in the hands of the Ministry of Interior, and as long as it continues to be addressed through security measures rather than political ones, such explosions will continue to erupt periodically, like the detonation of landmines. Prisoner: Saad Eddin Ibrahim.15 © Claremont Graduate University 3 W. Weessa: Al-Kosheḥ Massacre 17 June 2025 One of the reasons that may have upset the Egyptian authorities and led to Ibrahim’s arrest was his attempt, through the Ibn Khaldun Center which he founded and managed, to compile a record of the assaults that Copts had faced over 30 years. This report came six weeks after the al-Kosheh massacre and was published in an Arabic-language article in the Watani newspaper titled “The Thorny Path from al-Khanka (1972) to al-Kosheh (2000).” In the article, after listing these assaults, he stated: “What happened in al-Kosheh was not orchestrated by outside forces, nor was it the work of hidden hands. It is essentially the result of deficient education, distorted media, erratic political practices, and flawed security measures” (Ibrahim 2000, quoted in Weessa 2004: 238).
Elected deputies of the People’s Assembly had not bothered to investigate the declarations made by the government related to the events surrounding the massacre, nor had they demanded the formation of any fact-finding commission. The Assembly, which is supposed to represent and defend Egyptian citizens, receded into the background and left fact-finding commissions to foreign parliaments that attempted to intervene with the Egyptian government, although in vain.16 The Egyptian media, which cannot be considered as a counter-power in Egypt, also had failed in fulfilling its duties to cover the events. All the basic rules of honest journalism were violated.17 Instead, the media acted as an instrument of political propaganda. For weeks after the massacre, lies and denials were heard from the government, then repeated by the media. Unfortunately, this has been frequently the case regarding sectarian aggression against the Coptic community in Egypt, not only in relation to the al-Kosheḥ events, but in general. The only notable exception to this media policy was the Coptic-run newspaper Watani (Sidhom 2001).
In sharp contrast, international media offered a more balanced and truthful representation. For instance, The Economist described the massacre in al-Kosheḥ as part of a wider pattern of systemic neglect and marginalization of Egypt’s Christian minority. Their article noted that “the government chose to treat that outbreak as a security problem rather than as a symptom of wider social ills” (The Economist 2000) and criticized the Egyptian authorities for not doing enough to either prevent the violence or bring the perpetrators to justice. Such foreign coverage starkly contrasted with the domestic whitewashing that obfuscated the complicity and failure of the Egyptian press in times of national crisis.
The police investigations were a travesty, consisting only of efforts to conceal the truth, tamper with evidence, tailor the findings according to the authorities’ whims, and interfere both directly and indirectly in a sham trial. That trial ended in an acquittal of the accused, as if the 21 Copts had committed mass suicide.
In an academic analysis about the Egyptian legal system for the Middle East Review of International Affairs, Yustina Saleh reflected on the massacre in this way:
The al-Kosheh incident highlights a number of problems with the executive and judiciary in Egypt. First and most obviously is the police’s disregard for the rules of proper law enforcement. Second, this case highlights various problems with the Egyptian legal system, the most salient being the lack of respect and adherence to the rule of law. […] In Egypt, such criteria are highly problematic and generally undeveloped, resulting in the judiciary being dependent on government decisions at any specific time. (Saleh 2004: 83) The United States Department of State’s “International Religious Freedom Report” for 2003 explicitly criticized Egypt for its failure to bring to justice those responsible for killing 21 © Claremont Graduate University 4 W. Weessa: Al-Kosheḥ Massacre 17 June 2025 Christians at al-Kosheḥ and reported continued systemic discrimination and detention of converts from Islam (United States Department of State 2003). Likewise, a written statement submitted to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights by the Association for World Education described the massacre as the fortieth collective attack on Copts since 1972, noting that more than 1,000 Copts in al-Kosheḥ had previously been tortured by police in 1998, and that all accused of the 2000 killings were later acquitted, leaving bereaved families in shock and despair (Association for World Education 2004).
These reports offer a damning portrayal not only of the attack itself but of the structural impunity and discriminatory justice system that followed, where victims were left unprotected and murderers unpunished.
International observers and members of the Coptic community within and outside Egypt raised objections at this ruling, and the Egyptian government found itself in an embarrassing situation of judicial confusion. It had to revoke the ruling twice through the Court of Cassation as “erroneous application of the law” and “defective reasoning and corrupt deduction.”18 After reconsideration by the appeals court in Sohag, the ruling on 27 February 2003 included no sentences for the killing of Christians at al-Kosheḥ. Only one Muslim man, who had mistakenly killed a fellow Muslim during the chaos of the massacre, received a sentence of two years’ imprisonment. In response, Pope Shenouda iii wrote: “We appeal the ruling to God” (Shenouda 2003: 1).
Conclusion A notable and concerning feature of contemporary history is the extent to which violence against Coptic Christians have become normalized within certain sectors of Egyptian society. The al-Kosheḥ massacre was neither the first nor the last such event. The majority of this violence happened with the complicity of most Egyptian institutions. The events of the al-Kosheh massacre demonstrate how security, judicial, political, and media institutions have influenced state–society relations in Egypt over the past several decades. These dynamics underscore broader systemic challenges faced by religious minorities in navigating structures of power and accountability. For example:
The police in al-Kosheḥ used torture as the main means to impose their narrative of events, and destroyed evidence of the crimes, while neither the police nor other Egyptian security forces intervened to prevent or mitigate the massacre.
As for Egypt’s judiciary, its investigation of the al-Kosheḥ massacre was a travesty. Evidence of the crimes was concealed or tampered with. Findings were tailored according to the whims of the authorities. The state’s direct and indirect interference with the trial made it a sham that ended with the acquittal of the killers.
The People’s Assembly not only failed to form a fact-finding commission but went on to deny the torture of Copts in al-Kosheḥ.
The media: Not only was the Egyptian media’s response largely a pure propaganda tool for the ruling regime, but journalists violated the basic rules of press ethics in covering the massacre.
© Claremont Graduate University 5 W. Weessa: Al-Kosheḥ Massacre 17 June 2025