A 55-year-old Coptic Christian man was kidnapped and held for ransom. Although his family eventually paid, and the Muslim abductors took the money, they still killed the hapless Copt.
On April 26 in Sohag, Upper Egypt, Makram Nazir was returning home from his second job in the middle of the night when he was seized. His abductors then called his brother and demanded one million Egyptian pounds (equivalent of $131,000 USD).
Being an impossible amount to raise, the Coptic man’s family negotiated a significantly reduced price by phone with the abductors. The brother went to the local police station, provided them with all the information, including recordings of the phone calls, but, according to Watan News, “no one made a single move or took the matter seriously.”
After paying the ransom, three days passed before Nazir’s family found the Coptic man’s corpse in a canal.
Killing Christian hostages even after loved ones pay their ransom is not uncommon in Egypt. Such was the case, for instance, of 6-year-old Cyril Joseph: on May 2013, it was reported that his “family is in tatters after paying 30,000 pounds to the abductor, who still killed the innocent child and threw his body in his sewer system, where the body, swollen and moldy, was exhumed.”
Leave a Reply