Egypt jails four Christian teenagers for 'blasphemous' YouTube joke

An Egyptian court on Thursday sentenced three Coptic Christian teenagers to five years in jail for "contempt of Islam" for making a video seemingly mocking Muslim prayers.

A judge in the central Egyptian province of Minya also sent a fourth defendant, aged 15, to a juvenile detention centre for "an indefinite period".

Lawyer Maher Naguib said the four had not intended to insult Islam in the video, but merely to mock the beheadings carried out by Islamic State group militants.

"They have been sentenced for contempt of Islam and inciting sectarian strife," Naguib said.

"The judge didn't show any mercy. He handed down the maximum punishment," he added.

The video was filmed on a mobile phone in January 2015 when the three teenagers were aged between 15 and 17.

Their teacher, also seen in the video, has already been sentenced to three years in jail.

The four teenagers were still free as of Thursday and Naguib said he planned to appeal the sentence.

	Minya is populated by many Copts [Getty]

In the video, one teenager can be seen kneeling on the ground and imitating Muslim prayers while others stand behind him, laughing.

Later one of them is seen making a sign with his thumb to indicate the beheading of the one who is kneeling.

The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, an independent rights group, said ahead of Thursday's ruling that it watched the video and found that the four teenagers were performing scenes "imitating slaughter carried out by terrorist groups".

Targeting religious minorities

The Commission said in a statement that the four were detained for 45 days and subjected to "ill-treatment" before being released, pending trial.

The group further warned that there was a return "of using contempt of religion as accusations against writers and religious minorities".

Another rights group, the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, said that between 2011 and 2013, 42 defendants were tried in similar cases and, of them, 27 were convicted.

Egypt's constitution outlaws insults against the three monotheist religions recognised by the state - Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Copts, who comprise around ten percent of Egypt's 90-million population, are the Middle East's largest religious minority. They have long suffered sectarian violence including attacks on churches.

In 2014, a Coptic Christian teacher was jailed for six months after students' parents accused her of evangelising and of insulting Islam.

In a separate case the same year, a Coptic man was sentenced to six years for insulting Islam, after posting a picture of Prophet Muhammad on his Facebook page with an insulting comment.

Thursday's judgement comes a month after writer Fatima Naoot was jailed for three years for insulting Islam after she criticised the slaughter of animals during Eid al-Adha.

And in December, an Egyptian court jailed controversial Muslim scholar Islam al-Behairy for one year for remarks he made on his television programme, in which he called for reforms in "traditional Islamic discourse".