Monday June 18 3:52 PM ET

Egypt Mob Protests Blackmail Ring

By MAAMOUN YOUSSEF, Associated Press Writer

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Crowds protested outside a monastery in southern Egypt on Monday, angry at revelations that an excommunicated monk allegedly ran a sex-and-blackmail ring at the site, revered as a stopping place of Jesus and the Virgin Mary during their flight to Egypt.

The protest in Assiut came after thousands of Coptic Christians rioted outside their cathedral in Cairo on Sunday evening to protest 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 protests in the capital.

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.

Protesters were angered by a prominent story on the monk run by the Al-Nabaa weekly in its Sunday edition. Most of the 1,000 protesters in Assiut on Monday were Christians, though some Muslims joined the crowd, witnesses said.

More than a dozen color and black and white photographs purportedly taken from the videos were splashed across the weekly's front page and on two full inside pages. Police ordered the edition confiscated from newsstands and closed the newspaper for 15 days.

The images show a bearded man from the waist up either wearing a sleeveless white undershirt or bare-chested. Sections of the photos are blurred.

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

The Coptic Church in Cairo issued a statement Sunday night identifying the ex-monk as Adel Saadallah Gabriel and saying he was excommunicated in 1996. It did not give a reason for his excommunication.

The police officials said Monday 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 $100,000 dollars or gave gold and jewelry for the return of videos allegedly taken of them by 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.

Coptic Christians make up an estimated 10 percent of Egypt's 65 million people. They have complained of discrimination, particularly over jobs in the civil service, but the government denies this.