Crowds protest at sex-and-blackmail monk revelations

Crowds gathered at a monastery in southern Egypt today to protest at revelations that an excommunicated monk allegedly ran a sex-and-blackmail ring at the sacred site.

The site is revered as a stopping place of the Holy Family during their flight to Egypt.

The protest in Assiut, described as peaceful, came about 12 hours after thousands of Coptic Christians rioted outside their cathedral in Cairo to protest at a sensational story and photographs published by a weekly newspaper.

Six policemen were injured and several shops damaged when some protesters hurled stones and stopped traffic for hours during the Sunday night protests in the capital.

A smaller crowd of protesters gathered at the Cairo cathedral again today, but witnesses said the demonstration was peaceful.

Police said they arrested the ex-monk last week in Assiut, 180 miles south of Cairo, and brought him to the capital for questioning about allegations that he lured women into having sex with him inside the monastery and then blackmailed them with videos of their alleged encounters.

Photographs purportedly taken from the videos were splashed across the front page and on two full inside pages of the weekly newspaper al-Nabaa, which hit Cairo newsstands briefly on Sunday before police ordered the edition confiscated and closed the newspaper for 15 days.

Egypt’s prosecutor general Maher Abdel-Wahed summoned the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Mamdouh Mahran, for interrogation, police officials said.

The Coptic Church in Cairo issued a statement on Sunday night identifying the ex-monk as Adel Saadallah Gabriel and saying he was excommunicated in 1996.

‘‘The report published by the newspaper concerns a deviant person who has no relation with monkery, and the church has no authority over his beard and clothes behind which he hid and continued to wear without any right,’’ the statement said.

It did not give a reason for his excommunication.

The police officials said today that they arrested the ex-monk and his brother on the basis of a complaint from a woman who said she was one of his victims.

According to police, some victims paid as much as 400,000 Egyptian pounds (£75,000) or 4 kilograms (9lb) of gold and jewellery for the return of videos allegedly taken of them with the ex-monk.

The police said that the ex-monk kept copies of the videos - taken before he was excommunicated - and that they found 65 tapes in his possession.

The monastery is revered in Coptic Christian tradition as one of the sites visited by Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus when they fled to Egypt.

It was built in the fourth century and is known as the Burnt Monastery and also as the Virgin Mary Monastery.