In February 2013, Yusuf Ibrahim was arrested for double murder in Jersey City, New Jersey.
But the murders were not just any murders.
Ibrahim’s victims, 25-year-old Hanny Tawadros and 27-year-old Amgad Konds, were Coptic Christians from Egypt. The bodies of both men had been found with their heads and hands severed; their remains discovered in the backyard of a home in Buena Vista, New Jersey.
And their murderer, Indiana native and fellow Egyptian immigrant Yusuf Ibrahim, is Muslim.
According to police reports, the men had engaged in an argument with Ibrahim before being shot at close range, beheaded, then placed in shallow graves. Ibrahim was subsequently arrested and held on more than $3 million bail. But for more than a year, greater details surrounding these gruesome murders have been conspicuously absent from mainstream media coverage. Why? Many believe that the killings were religiously motivated, and that because beheading is consistent with Muslim teachings, the men were murdered because they were Christians.
Though this unsettling act of violence took place in the United States, it reflects the intensifying persecution that thousands of believers in Egypt have been enduring under Muslim domination in recent years — and the disturbing reality that such persecution is not limited to Muslim-dominated countries. “The victims were Coptic Christians and the murderer was Muslim, and we are painfully aware of the status and treatment of Coptic Christians under Muslim rule in Egypt,” Pamela Geller, executive director of the American Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, has been quoted as saying.
Please remember to pray for the safety of Egyptian Christians, as well as all believers trapped under Islamic oppression throughout the Middle East.