CAIRO - Egyptian security authorities continue to keep a lid on results of investigations into a New Year's Day bombing outside a church in the coastal city of Alexandria, where 23 Copts were killed, as forensic doctors Wednesday submitted their final report on blast without 'new clues'.
"The Forensic Authority submitted its report on the Al-Qiddissein (Two Saints) Church bombing to Alexandria prosecutors. The report focused on the postmortems of the dead bodies and the scene of the blast," a judicial source said.
It added that the report only focused on technical aspects such as the blast waves, contents of the bomb and the damage caused to the parking cars. "However, it could not determine exactly if it was a suicide bomber or a bomb," the source said.
The Interior Ministry had slammed as baseless earlier media reports that the bombing was carried out by a Pakistani suicide bomber and ruled out the possibility that a car bomb was used.
"Still, we have nothing to say to media about the bombing. Such terror acts take extended investigations that may take much more time," a security official said on condition of anonymity.
Officials suspect an al-Qaeda-inspired bomber was behind the blast outside the Alexandria church after Islamist websites had carried repeated threats to attack churches and have since carried threats to strike again.
The attack at the Alexandria church sparked protests nationwide before security brought things under control.
Meanwhile, Pope Shenouda, who led mass on Coptic Christmas on January 6, in a tense but incident-free service, held a small and closed celebration Tuesday night for the Feast of Epiphany over concerns for the safety of the country's Christians instead of the larger mass that had been planned, the pope's legal adviser said.
"Scores of Copts had decided to join the Pope in celebration, which caused raised for the lives of those people in light of al-Qaeda's threats and the tense environment after Alexandria's events," Naguib Gabriel added.
Christians make up about 10 per cent of Muslim-majority Egypt's 80 million people. Tensions often flare between the two communities over issues such as building churches or close relationships between members of the two faiths.
