CAIRO – The Egyptian government on Sunday executed an expelled monk convicted of killing an abbot in a monastery in the desert north of Cairo, he said.
The 2018 murder of Bishop Epiphany, abbot of the Monastery of San Macaire, surprised the Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church, one of the oldest Christian communities in the world and brought monastic to the faith, built in the 4th century.
Two expelled monks, known as Isaiah and Faltaous, were convicted of the murder of Epiphany and sentenced to death by a juvenile court in April 2019. The Court of Cassation, the country’s highest criminal court, upheld last year the death penalty opposed to Isaiah, while Faltaous sentenced to life in prison in a retrial.
The church expelled the two priests after the murder and took steps to instill camp in monastic life, including an interruption of the admission of novices to the country’s monasteries for a year.
Isaiah was executed on Sunday on the gallows at the Wadi Natrun crime complex in Beheira province in the Nile Delta, authorities said, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to inform the media.
The abbot died in the middle of the night in a component of the vast monastery that was not covered by security cameras. Prosecutors said he shot at the head through an iron rod.
The murder of the abbot revealed a facet of the Church that few people in Egypt, Muslim or Christian, knew, adding the developing strength and independence of priests in remote monasteries that seem to disagree with Pope Tawadros II and the central leadership of the Church. .
Among these monks, some adopt a policy of is transitionism and the guardians themselves, oppose a more classic faction that promotes the construction of bridges with other churches and political aid to the government.
Isaiah’s execution is the latest in a series of executions that place Egypt among the top 4 countries in the Middle East as the highest sensitive on the global list of executioners by 2020, according to Amnesty International. The arab world’s most populous country carried out 107 executions last year. a significant increase of 32 in 2019, the organization said.
Last month, the government executed Islamists suspected of murder in an attack on a police station in 2013, killing 15 people and 11 police officers.
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