A 17-year old Coptic Christian girl named Tihani al-Nur Hakim was kidnapped earlier this week in the village of al-Kom al-Qibliyya in Samalout, Upper Egypt.
Her family accuses the next door neighbor, a Muslim man named Ahmed Khalifa.
An eyewitness said he saw the Muslim man seizing the girl. Although the family planned on organizing a protest, village elders counseled against it, lest it backfire by provoking more of the area’s Muslims to retaliate against the Christian minority of the region, as often happens whenever Copts demand their human rights.
Two days earlier, a young Coptic man named Abu Noub Zarif Yusif also disappeared from the region and then reappeared saying that he had converted to Islam.