Two Christians burned alive in Sinai

EL-ARISH: Egyptian security officials said suspected militants have killed two Christians in the restive north of the Sinai Peninsula, days after a Daesh affiliate vowed to step up a wave of attacks on the embattled minority.
The officials said Saad Hana, 65, was shot dead and his son Medhat, 45, was abducted and burned alive before their bodies were dumped on a roadside in El-Arish on Wednesday. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.
Coptic Christians, who make up 10 percent of Egypt’s population, have increasingly come under attack since the military overthrow of an elected president in 2013.
A Daesh video released this week cast them as allies of the West and vowed further attacks.
Separately on Wednesday, Jean-Louis Tauran, a representative from the Vatican French cardinal, and Abbas Shuman, the deputy imam of Al-Azhar mosque, attended a joint seminar on ways to tackle religious intolerance in the world.
Blind Sheikh’s body back home
The body of a blind Egyptian jihadist convicted of plotting terror attacks in New York was brought back to Egypt for burial after he died in a US federal prison over the weekend.
Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheikh, was arrested in 1993 and convicted in 1995 along with nine followers of conspiracy to blow up the UN building and several New York landmarks. He was serving a life sentence in prison when he died on Saturday.
Abdel-Rahman was the leader of a radical organization, the most feared militant group in Egypt in the 1980s and 1990s. He fled to the US in 1990.
Dozens of his followers waited at the Cairo airport on Wednesday to receive the body and take it to his hometown in Dakahliya province.