Investigators believe they found the allegedly deranged serial killer behind the gruesome murders in the Upper Egyptian village of Shamseddin, reports Pierre Loza from Al-Minya Controversy surrounds the string of grisly killing of defenseless villagers in Shamseddin, Al-Minya governorate, although security officials announced that they have arrested a man suspected of carrying out the gruesome murders. The man, identified as 27-year-old Mohamed Ali Abdel-Latif, is a high school drop out from the village. Amidst the increasing public scepticism, the authorities announced that the murderer confessed and showed them where he buried the body parts of his victims and handed over the crime weapons. Although details of the crime sequence have not yet been revealed, investigators believe the alleged killer suffers from schizophrenia or split personality disorder. Gamal Madi, psychiatrist, treated Abdel-Latif. Ten people were killed on the night of 28 December. All the victims were butchered in much the same manner, with a cut from the throat downwards and a mutilation of the genitalia. Located on the same street, all three homes where these heinous acts took place are within a 100-metre vicinity of one another, making the crime all the more disturbing. The grim murders have baffled public and officials alike. In the room where El-Said Mahmoud, his wife, and two children were butchered, the light is never turned off and the Quran plays continuously in the hope of bringing peace to a room which has witnessed indescribable violence. The room walls, sprayed with blood, showed all the signs of the sinister work of a pathological killer. Towards the end of the street, in the home of the late Yehia Ahmed Bakr, five pigeons were left around the bodies of the victims. "These pigeons were a symbol of peace, whoever did this, wants to say that peace is dead, at least in our village," said a bystander. On the night of the massacres, Mohamed Yehia was sleeping at his grandmother's house. The 13-year-old woke up to the screams of villagers who had just discovered the murder of Taha Shamseddin and his 54-year-old mother. When Yehia ran home to check if his family was fine, he discovered the bodies of his parents, his one-year-old brother and nine- year-old sister, with the pigeons scattered around them. Three days after the murders, Yehia had planned to sit for an Arabic exam the following morning. "What use is it? All of these investigators and policemen, they can't bring my family back, can they? They didn't even come quickly, we discovered the murders at 5am and they came at 9pm," Yehia lamented. A science teacher who also taught theatre, Mohamed's father led the life of an educated man and a farmer. "When he would come back from school he would change his suit and put on a galabeya and start working the land like any other farmer," he said. The tragic incidents also highlighted the fact that like so many Upper Egyptian villages, Shamseddin is underdeveloped and marginalised. "There is no school, no hospital, no police station! Labourers have to work for as little as LE6 a day, is this justice?" Yehia asked. Like many migrant workers in Shamseddin, Mohamed Radi works in a Cairo cleaning company. Fainting at the news that his in-laws, El-Said and his family, were killed, he was fortunate to know that his wife and two children in the floor above them were not harmed. "My wife heard a light knock on the door around dawn, she thought it might be someone waking her father up for dawn prayers," Radi said. Radi says that when his wife Zeinab woke up in the morning, she found the interior door closed. As she turned around, and entered through the front door which was open, she discovered that her entire family was butchered. In the aftermath of the murders, numerous rumours circulated in the closely knit village of about 8,000 people. "Some people were saying that the government was going to cut the electricity and people started buying gas lamps," says local farmer Ahmed Mahmoud. The villagers were quite angered by recent newspaper articles that claimed that the assailant was mentally deranged. "How could this person possibly be deranged? He goes into three houses on the same street, kills 10 people without anyone hearing a dog barking or a single scream," Mahmoud said. Although the village is crawling with security forces, villagers feel extremely unsafe even in their own homes. "People are so scared, that they haven't even been able to mourn their dead properly. You now have three or four families staying in one room because people are scared to sleep alone," explained Mahmoud. Security officials have been quite uneasy about commenting on the murders, leaving a lot of the details surrounding the case unclear. "From what I hear so far, finger prints are smudged and difficult to identify. Forensics experts were also looking into the possibility that victims were sedated, and killed while they were asleep," said a security official who preferred to remain anonymous. There were speculations that the killings were part of black magic rituals used in the process of opening an ancient Egyptian tomb. "Villages that deal with ancient Egyptian artifacts usually enjoy a little bit of affluence, but as you can see this village is very poor," said an official. The case was all the more puzzling because the victims involved, bore no animosity towards anyone in the village. As the custom goes in Upper Egyptian vendetta cases, women and children are usually exempted from payback killings. In this case, elder women and infants as young as one-year-old were not spared. Al-Minya parliament member, Alaa Makadi believes these incidents mark a historical shift in culture of the governorate. "Al-Minya is characterised by serenity and peace, if you look at the last parliamentary elections, you will notice that there was very little thuggery here," Makadi said. Makadi believes that part of the problem lies in the disappearance of traditional security networks in rural society. "In the old days it was common to find an old man roaming the village at night carrying a gun. Although firearms might not even work properly, his presence made a difference. We want to bring this old guard tradition back to our villages," Makadi said. Makadi was approached by a number of residents, who offered to pay an extra fee on their utility bills to ensure the appointment of a street guard, or ghafeer. "I have never seen a crime like this in Egypt in my whole life, I even asked people that are older than me, they also said it was unprecedented."
