Ten mutilated bodies were found early yesterday in a southern Egyptian village, some of them missing their vital organs and laying in pools of blood, police sources said. The bodies of 10 Egyptians — four men, two women and four children — were found in three neighboring houses in the village of Ezbet Shams El-Din, 225 kilometers south of Cairo, the sources said. Their stomachs and throats were slashed open and many of their body parts, including genitals, were cut off, said an AFP correspondent in this village near the town of Bani Mazar, in the Minya governorate.Neighbors and relatives later identified the victims in one of the houses as primary school teacher Yehia Ahmed Abu Baker, his wife Nemaat and two children, Mohammed and Asmaa. A son who spent the night at his grandmother’s discovered the bodies in the morning. In the second house lay the disfigured bodies of Taha Abdul Meguid Mohammed, a young laborer and his father, Ahmed Hassan. Mohammed’s brother, who lives nearby, found the bodies when he went to the house to wake him up for dawn prayers, police told AFP. The third house contained the bodies of Said Mahmud Awda, a farmer, that of his son Ahmed, and two daughters, Fatma and Sabah. Awda’s two other daughters who live on the second floor of the same building discovered the bodies.
There was no blood relation between the victims in the three houses in the impoverished village and police said they still had no clue if the crime was committed by an individual or more than one person. Investigations are ongoing to determine the motive behind the brutal slayings and catch the culprits, police said.