New Year sectarian massacre in Egypt

At least 21 people have been killed at a Egyptian church in an explosion which officials have blamed on a suicide bomber with foreign links.
More than 70 others were injured in the attack, during a new year's service at the al-Qiddissin (Saints) Church in the northern port city of Alexandria.
Coptic Christians and Muslims clashed after the attack, but police moved in and used tear gas to restore order.
President Hosni Mubarak urged Egyptians to unite against "terrorism".
In a televised statement, he blamed "foreign hands" for the bombing.
"Wicked terrorists targeted the nation, Copts and Muslims," he said.
"It is a terrorist operation that is alien to us... We will all cut off the head of the snake, confront terrorism and defeat it."
So far no group has said it carried out the attack.


bout 1,000 worshippers were attending the new year's mass at the church in the Sidi Bechr district of the Mediterranean port city.
As the service drew to a close after midnight, a bomb went off in the street outside.
"The last thing I heard was a powerful explosion and then my ears went deaf," 17-year-old Marco Boutros told the Associated Press from his hospital bed. "All I could see were body parts scattered all over."
Another witness told the private On-TV channel that he had seen two men park a car outside the church and get out just before the blast.
Officials initially thought the cause was a car bomb, but the interior ministry later ruled it out, saying the attack was instead "carried out by a suicide bomber who died among the crowd".
The device was packed with pieces of metal shrapnel to cause the maximum amount of harm, a statement said.
And the circumstances of the attack, "given the methods that currently prevail in terrorist activities at the global and regional level, clearly indicate" that it was "planned and carried out by foreign elements", it added.
But the most senior Coptic cleric in Alexandria, Archbishop Arweis, said the security services wanted to blame a suicide bomber instead of a car bomb so they could write it off as something carried out by a lone attacker.
He also denounced the "lack of protection" in front of the church.
"There were only three soldiers and an officer in front of the church. Why did they have so little security at such a sensitive time when there's so many threats coming from al-Qaeda?" he told the Associated Press.
The government said it had stepped up security measures outside churches after the Islamic State of Iraq, a militant umbrella group that includes al-Qaeda in Iraq, threatened the Copts of Egypt at the end of October.