CAIRO - Thousands of Egypt's Christians gathered outside the official TV and Radio building Monday for the second day in a row to protest over a church that was torched in a village in Helwan, south of Cairo. About 3,000 Coptic Christians blocked the Corniche Road in front of the Nile-side huge building and urged the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, that took over the country's affairs after Mubarak stepped down on February 11, to conduct an “urgent investigation” into setting the church on fire. Some Muslims joined the crowd. The Shahedeen Church (the Two Martyrs' Church) in Helwan was torched after a row sparked over an affair between a Christian man and a Muslim woman, according to local witnesses. Such relationships often cause tensions in Muslim-majority Egypt, where Christians make up about 10 per cent of the country's 80 million people. Members of the woman's Muslim family clashed among themselves over the affair and two Muslim men were killed. Muslims from the woman's village then burned the church on Saturday, the witnesses added. The protest started late on Saturday. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces said the Army would rebuild the church before Easter holidays. Meanwhile, new Prime Minister Essam Sharaf Monday started negotiations with the Coptic protesters to end their sit-in. The Coptic Christian leader Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria, currently receiving medical treatment in the US, Monday dispatched his secretary Father Youanis back to Cairo to follow up on the church row. Last year Egypt had more than its usual share of sectarian strife, and a rights group said such clashes had been on the rise. But mass political protests that ousted President Hosni Mubarak on Feb. 11 brought Muslims and Christians together. Last month, an Egyptian court ratified the death sentence against a man convicted of killing six Christians outside a church in Upper Egypt. The State Security Emergency Court had referred Mohamed Ahmed Hussein to the country's top Muslim cleric known as the Mufti last month, a legal formality before the court can announce a death sentence. Hussein is to be hanged for the murder of six Copts and a Muslim policeman in the southern town of Nagaa Hammadi, after the Coptic Christmas Eve Mass in January 2010.
