CAIRO: The gatekeeper of Marina Church, 67-year-old Tadrous, was assaulted last Thursday by a group of workers who originally came to pave the roads, Priest Anglos Ishaq told Daily News Egypt. The latest conflict in the ongoing land dispute saga took place last Thursday at 10 am when General Ahmed Moharam, head of El Alamein local council, arrived on site with 100 people carrying chains and batons and attacked Tadrous, alleged Ishaq. The General ordered his men to detain Tadrous in a wooden booth in the church and asked four of his men to hold him down, Ishaq added. Ishaq stopped the Copts that were inside the church from interfering in the dispute and let Moharam enter the area with some men he brought to pave the road, a process that lasted four hours. The final status of the land in dispute, according to Ishaq, is that no one is allowed to do anything with [the land] until the court decides who owns the land, according to the Prime Minister s decision. The church has filed a complaint at the police station and a memo to the prosecutor's office against Moharam, said Ishaq, and will take it all the way to the public prosecutor's office. It is shameful to trespass and make such an assault on church land, he added. Last month, President Hosni Mubarak granted the Marina Church ownership of the piece of land in dispute, according to a previous interview with Ishaq. The decision came a few weeks after conflicts erupted between the church and the Marsah Matrouh governorate, which saw protests and clashes between some hundred Copts and security forces that resulted in injuries and the detainment of around 11 Coptic protestors. The conflict is over a 5,000-square-meter piece of land the church bought five years ago. They acquired a license to build a church on the land, but the Marsah Matrouh governorate revoked it. The crux of the issue is a clash between Marsah Matrouh governorate and the Urban Communities Authority about who has the authority to buy and sell public land in El Alamein, said Ishaq in a previous interview. Ishaq previously said that "the conflict is not about religion or Christianity, it is a conflict between the Ministry of Housing and the Marsah Matrouh governorate. The church, says Ishaq, had bought the land on which the existing Marina Church was built from the Urban Communities Authority affiliated to the Ministry of Housing. But when the church approached the Urban Communities Authority to buy another piece of land, the Marsah Matrouh governor claimed that the land falls under the jurisdiction of the governorate which has the exclusive right to sell it. General Mohamed Al-Shahat, governor of Marsah Matrouh told the press that according to by-law No. 34 of 1979 regulating local administration, the governorate was the sole authority in charge of land within its cordon. Ishaq then publicized documents that prove that the church bought the land from the Urban Communities Authority, which, he insists, has the legal power to sell. The documents, published in the local press on Aug. 21, included all the legal papers dating back to 2002 and contain the legal steps that the church had taken in the past five years to buy the disputed land; the most significant being an Oct. 16, 2006 agreement sent by the Urban Communities Authority to the Church approving the sale. Another document, dated March 2007, was the Ministry of Defense s permission to sell the land to the church. Ishaq further indicated that Al-Shahat said that that the border of the Marsah Matrouh governorate's jurisdiction ends on km 106 along the Marsah Matrouh highway. This means that Matrouh has no authority over the disputed land which lies on km 106.9, he says.
