Eye witness indicated that shooter was shouting Allauakber while was shooting. Shooting incident follows Jan. 1 church bombing
A Muslim policeman shot dead an Egyptian Christian on a train on Tuesday and wounded five others, sources said, less than two weeks after a church was bombed in Egypt’s deadliest attack on Christians in years.
The shooting is likely to stoke tensions in the Muslim majority country, where Christians protested for several days after the Jan. 1 bombing of a church in Alexandria that killed up to 23 people.
It was not immediately clear why he opened fire and whether he had deliberately targeted the Christian, but a security official said "it was a random shooting, and Christians and Muslims are among those hurt."
Christians make up a tenth of Egypt’s 79 million people and have long complained of unfair treatment. They have accused the government of not doing enough to protect them.
Mariam Salah, a doctor in Minya, south of the capital, told Reuters her hospital was treating five wounded Christians. She said one of them told her a sixth Christian was shot dead.
A security source confirmed one Christian had been shot dead and said the attacker was a Muslim police officer.
An Interior Ministry statement named the attacker as officer Amer Ashour Abdel-Zaher, a name that suggests he was a Muslim.
It also named the man killed and the five others wounded, saying one of those injured was the dead man’s wife. The husband and wife were from Cairo and the others were from Minya. At least two of the names indicated they were Christians.
The Interior Ministry said the suspect boarded a train and "opened fire on some train passengers from his pistol and ran away". It said the perpetrator was caught at his home and an investigation was under way.
The official news agency said the train was travelling between Cairo and Assiut in southern Egypt.
Sectarian violence
The Jan. 1 church bombing was untypical of the kind of sectarian violence that sometimes erupts over issues such as building churches and romantic relationships between members of the two religions.
No one has yet claimed responsibility for that attack, which came after threats to Egypt’s Copts from the Al-Qaeda-linked group in Iraq that claimed a deadly October 31 attack on a Baghdad cathedral.
The group, the Islamic State of Iraq, said it would attack Copts if their church failed to release two women the group claimed were being held against their will after converting to Islam.
President Hosni Mubarak has blamed "foreign hands" as being behind the incident, and authorities said a suicide bomber was responsible.
Egypt’s Christians have long complained that they receive unfair treatment, pointing to laws such as those that make it easier to build a mosque than a church. The government insists that all citizens are treated equally.
In response to the Jan. 1 church bombing, the head of the world’s Roman Catholics, Pope Benedict, called for more effective steps to protect Christian minorities in Egypt and other predominantly Muslim countries where attacks had happened.
In a statement on Tuesday, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the pope’s statement as "unacceptable interference" in its affairs and recalled its Vatican ambassador back to Cairo for consultation.