Egyptian Blogger’s Account of a Vigil in Cairo
By ROBERT MACKEY
Video shot by an Egyptian blogger of a vigil in Cairo on Friday for Coptic Christians who were killed a week earlier by a suicide bomber.
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Hundreds of Egyptians attended a candlelight vigil in downtown Cairo on Friday, the Coptic Christian Christmas, to show their solidarity with members of the Coptic community a week after a suicide bomber killed at least 21 people at a church in Alexandria during a New Year’s Eve Mass.
The Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm published a photograph of a man at the vigil near Cairo’s Saad Zaghloul Shrine, holding a sign with both the Christian cross and the Muslim crescent on it.
An Egyptian-American blogger, Gigi Ibrahim, described the vigil in text and pictures via Twitter and YFrog and posted the video embedded above on YouTube.
Ms. Ibrahim also posted images on Facebook of an earlier event at the Kasr El Nile bridge in Cairo, where, she wrote, people were silently reading the Bible and the Koran to mourn the dead.
In the captions for the photos she posted of the vigil, Ms. Ibrahim noted that there was some disagreement about whether the event should be simply a silent solidarity vigil or an anti-government rally: “Some people doing the usual anti- gov. chants while others just quiet, mourning… a mess.” She added: “There are too many captains in this ship… OMG so not in harmony… people r confused.”
Writing on the vigil later on Facebook, Ms. Ibrahim observed:
some were chanting against the government, holding it responsible for the tragedy among other things, while others were just there holding a candle mourning the dead in silence. Whether angry, silent, marching, protesting, singing, or simply just being there, all the 400 attended were mourning Egypt.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/egyptian-bloggers-account-of-a-vigil-in-cairo/?ref=world
