Thousands of Egyptian mourners marched behind the coffin of the ‘martyr of the head scarf’ on Monday — a pregnant Muslim woman who was stabbed to death in a German courtroom as her young son watched.
Many in her homeland were outraged by the attack and saw what they described as a low key response in Germany as an example of racism and anti-Muslim sentiment.
Her husband was critically wounded in the attack Wednesday in Dresden when he tried to intervene and was stabbed by the attacker and accidentally shot by court security.
‘There is no god but God and the Germans are the enemies of God,’ chanted the mourners for 32-year-old Marwa al-Sherbini in her hometown of Alexandria, where her body was buried after being flown back from Germany.
Must Read
Bloodbath in German court, West hates Muslims
‘We will avenge her killing,’ her brother Tarek el-Sherbini told The Associated Press by telephone from the mosque where prayers were being recited in front of his sister’s coffin. ‘In the west, they don’t recognize us. There is racism.’
Al-Sherbini, who was about four months pregnant and wore the Islamic head scarf, was involved in a court case against her neighbour for calling her a terrorist and was set to testify against him when he stabbed her 18 times inside the courtroom in front of her three-year-old son.
Her husband, who was in Germany on a research fellowship, came to her aid and was also stabbed by the neighbour and shot in the leg by a security guard who initially mistook him for the attacker, German prosecutors said. He is now in critical condition in a German hospital, according to al-Sherbini’s brother.
‘The guards thought that as long as he wasn’t blond, he must be the attacker so they shot him,’ al-Sherbini told an Egyptian television station.
The extremist man, who has only been identified as 28-year-old Alex W., remains in detention and prosecutors have opened an investigation on suspicion of murder.
Christian Avenarius, the prosecutor in Dresden where the incident took place, described the killer as driven by a deep hatred of Muslims. ‘It was very clearly a xenophobic attack of a fanatical lone wolf.’
He added that the attacker was a Russian of German descent who had immigrated to Germany in 2003 and had expressed his contempt for Muslims at the start of the trial.
Pages: 1 2
