Lieutenant General Hussein Kamal said on Monday that 67 people were wounded during the raid of the church in central Baghdad by gunmen demanding the release of al-Qaeda prisoners in Iraq and Egypt.
The toll only included hostages and police, not attackers, but did not specify if any were Americans.
An al-Qaeda group claimed its fighters had captured Christians in Iraq and gave the Coptic church in Egypt a 48-hour deadline to release alleged female captives, the SITE monitoring group said early Monday.
The Islamic State of Iraq said an “angry group of mujahedeen from among the supporters of Allah raided one of the filthy dens of idolatry that was used by the Christians of Iraq as a headquarters to fight the religion of Islam,” SITE reported.
The statement, posted on jihadist websites, was released after the bloody end to the hostage drama in Baghdad late on Sunday.
The Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) made no mention of the date or location of its raid, which it said was launched “to help our weak captive Muslim sisters in the Muslim country of Egypt.”
It said it was giving the Coptic Church in Egypt 48 hours to indicate the status of Muslim women “imprisoned in… the monasteries of disbelief and the churches of idolatry in Egypt” and to release them or its fighters would kill the Iraqi Christian captives.
SITE said the threat to Egypt comes amid calls by jihadists and al-Qaeda’s media arm for Muslims to take action against the Egyptian Coptic church over the alleged imprisonment of two women, both wives of Coptic priests.
It said jihadists believe one of the women had converted to Islam and was then imprisoned in a church, while the second had allegedly wanted to convert to Islam and suffered the same fate.
The Qaeda group also issued an audiotape from a fighter reiterating the threat to the Coptic church and identifying the women in Egypt as Camellia Shehata and Wafaa Constantine, SITE said.
“The end will not stop at killing the hostages only,” the fighter with a suicide battalion was quoted as saying.
“Not only in Iraq, but in Egypt and the Levant and the rest of the countries in the area; there are hundreds of thousands of your people amongst us and hundreds of churches, and all of them will be targets for us if you do not comply.”
Source: AlArabiya.net