Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Cairo (Agenzia Fides) - The Egyptian Court of Appeal confirmed the sentence to five years in prison against the preacher Ahmed Mahmoud, also known by the nickname Abu Islam, convicted for having torn the pages of a Bible during a demonstration organized in September 2012 in front of the American Embassy in Egypt, where he had intervened to inflame the crowd. The Salafist militants, in the spiral of collective self-exaltation, set fire to a copy of the sacred text already mishandled by the preacher. The Egyptian Supreme Court has also condemned Abu Islam to pay a fine of about a thousand dollars.
The event in which the Bible was burned had been organized to protest against the film "The Innocence of Muslims", put online on Youtube, which even Christian leaders in the Middle East had condemned as offensive to Islam, and was the pretext of violent reactions in many Muslim-majority Countries.
The confirmation of the sentence is relevant because the process against the preacher was the first filed in Egypt for a case of blasphemy against Christianity. (GV) (Agenzia Fides 23/03/2015)
