EGYPT - Jan. 6 - 4 Muslims Charged With Killing Christians.

The Interior Ministry says police arrested 4 Muslims on charges of killing 9 Christians in sectarian violence that left 20 people dead in southern Egypt. Police say 2 of the suspects were hunted down and captured in the hills near the village of El Kusheh, where much of the violence occurred on Jan. 2. A police official says the other 2, who are brothers, were arrested in El Kusheh. The arrests come a day after a Cabinet minister said the "real culprits" would be immediately brought to justice. (The promise was seen as an attempt by the government to assuage the sentiments of the minority Christians who comprise 10% of the country's 64m people and sometimes complain of discrimination by the Muslim majority.) On Jan. 6, calm returns to El Kusheh, a predominantly Coptic Christian village whose residents were preparing to celebrate the Coptic Christmas on Jan. 7. In a written statement, the Interior Ministry says the 2 men caught in the hills - Abul Fadl Ibrahim, 45, and Khalifa Refai, 40 - were charged with killing 8 Christians and injuring another. Police had found the 8 bodies in one place. A 9th victim, Morkos Rushdy Gendy, 47, was also found lying among the bodies but had survived with a leg wound. The statement says Gendy identified Ibrahim and Refai as the killers. It says the other 2 suspects, Al Sayed Ahmad, 21, and Mahmoud Ahmad, 25, were accused of killing 16-year-old Atef Ezzat Zaky, also on Jan. 2. Of the remaining 11 victims, 9 were Christians, 1 was a Muslim, and 1 person's religion remains unclear. No arrests have been made in their killings. Besides the 4 suspects, police also arrest 28 people and charge them with spreading rumours, looting, arson and hurting Muslim-Christian relations. They also confiscate cars carrying looted items. The violence began on Dec. 31 after an argument between a Christian shopkeeper and a Muslim customer in El Kusheh, 440 km south of Cairo. The looting and arson continued until Jan. 2, when villagers fought with guns and knives. (The religious violence is unusual for Egypt, where Christians and Muslims have lived together peacefully. The Christians' complaints have been directed at occasional police brutality, terror attacks by Islamic militants and discrimination in government jobs. El Kusheh had gained international attention in 1998 also when residents accused the police of widespread torture of Christians during a murder investigation. The government denied the allegations, and no policeman was ever charged with wrongdoing.) In a statement, the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights notes the El Kusheh violence was only the 4th time that Muslims and Christians had clashed in the last 3 decades in the country. The statement says: "The organisation sees that what happened in El Kusheh doesn't represent a social phenomenon but at the same time is not just an accident".