Egypt: widow’s video goes viral after police kill ‘criminal gang’ 

The Egyptian Interior Ministry has insisted that police officers killed a “criminal gang” when they were fired at when going to arrest three gang members. The dead men, along with a fourth person who was arrested, are alleged to have murdered a man and wounded two others, one of them a child, on 15 June before fleeing the crime scene in Asyut.

Police investigations are said to have revealed that the three men were hiding in a house in the area of Sadfa Police Station. The “criminals”, it added, opened fire at the police, who had “no choice” but to shoot back which resulted in all three being killed.

Officials denied the allegation by the widow of one the men killed that the police had stormed into her home and killed her husband and two of his friends, and terrorised women and children in Bani Fiz Island in Asyut Governorate. The allegation was made in a video that has gone viral on social media, in which the woman said that the killings took place after her husband returned from Saudi Arabia.

According to the ministry, the police found drugs, weapons and ammunition in the house, as well as the vehicle used when the alleged murder took place.

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