'Blasphemous' Coptic Children Released

An Egyptian court has ordered the release of two Coptic Christian children accused of insulting Islam, a source in the prosecutor's office said on Thursday. The source said that the prosecutor, Abdel Meguid Mahmud took the decision because the accused, aged nine and 10, are minors. The children, Nabil Nagy Rizk, 10, and Mina Nady Farag, 9, were arrested on Tuesday, for insulting Islam in Upper Egypt's governorate of Beni Suef, after the imam of their local mosque filed a complaint against them. The two boys were being held in the Beni Suef juvenile detention centre, after being charged with blasphemy, and were expected to be remain there until at least Sunday, pending further investigation, according to local residents. Ibrahim Mohamed Ali, the village imam, accused the children of tearing up pages of the Quran and urinating on them. The defiled Quran copies were reportedly found by the Imam near the mosque in the village of Ezbet Marko in the Upper Egypt. Ibrahim, the Imam, then brought the children to the local bishop and insisted someone else had incited them to desecrate the Quran before throwing it towards the mosque. Unsatisfied with the church's decision not to castigate the two boys, four residents from the village then turned them in to the police. The incident came just a day after a Coptic teacher was interrogated by the Assiut Prosecutor’s Office over accusations of blasphemy. Nevine al-Sayed, a preparatory school history teacher, was accused by one of her students of insulting the Prophet Mohamed while teaching a lesson about his life. A wave of arrests has taken place recently across Egypt after several individuals were accused by others of "committing blasphemy." Most of those arrested were Copts accused of "insulting Islam." Earlier this month in Sohag governorate, a Coptic school teacher, Bishoy Kamel, was sentenced to six years in prison for posting cartoons deemed defamatory to Islam and Prophet Mohammed on social-networking site Facebook, as well as for insulting President Mohamed Morsi and his family. This followed the arrest of a Coptic man, 25-year-old Albert Saber, on 13 September, who was charged with insulting the religion after allegedly posting the controversial anti-Islam short film, Innocence of Muslims, on his Facebook page. Saber, who was referred to Marg Misdemeanor Court, is still in detention awaiting trial.