A second man was killed following the al-Omraneyya church riots on Wednesday, after he was shot in the stomach. Police and Coptic demonstrators clashed over the construction of a church in a poor neighborhood south of Cairo densely populated by Christians. Nearly one thousand Coptic Christians staged protests in the al-Omraneyya neighborhood after police halted construction of a new church, according to eyewitnesses. Milad Malak Soliman, who died on Friday, was hospitalized in al-Haram district, after he was shot on Wednesday. The police ordered the autopsy of the body. In the meantime, the US said it was investigating the riots with the Egyptian government, according to US State Department Spokesman Philip Crowley. He went on to say that the US would continue to express its concerns surrounding these events. “We must investigate the incident,” Crowley said in a press statement on Thursday. He also said it was unlikely the events were related to Sunday's parliamentary elections. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) criticized the violent clashes. USCIRF Chairman Leonardo Leo said such events are the result of “sectarian tensions” and a lack of freedom to build places of worship, as well as an emerging phenomenon of religious hatred and sectarian strife being incited by the media and religious figures. In an annual report by USCIRF published in October, Egypt ranked second among countries found to violate religious freedoms. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Hossam Zaki said that the report "was published by a party that has no right to run evaluations on this subject, and therefore it is unacceptable in principle." A succession of stories in the mainstream US and Egyptian media have been noticed recently, with the former calling for reforms and the latter considering them an infringement of local sovereignty.
