Sectarian Violence Mounts in Egypt : Mideast: Wild rumors of a 5-year-old girl being raped trigger an ugly clash between Muslim militants and Coptic Christians.

It began at dusk with a report that a 5-year-old Muslim girl had been raped by a Coptic Christian grocer and spread like hellfire through this dusty desert oasis. By midnight, villagers said she had been both raped and murdered. As Easter Sunday dawned, it was widely believed the deed had been perpetrated by a Coptic priest.

Authorities tried desperately to quell the rumor. The little girl’s family paraded her through the streets, assuring the populace that she was indeed alive and unharmed. The governor distributed a leaflet and broadcast a statement over the loudspeakers of the village mosque, avowing that the child had been examined “by Muslim doctors” and had been found to be “medically intact.”

But not before the village had exploded into violence. Dozens of Muslim militants, chanting “ Allahu Akhbar! “ (“God is Great”) and “No Christians!” rampaged through the narrow, unpaved streets, attacking and burning 12 Christian shops, at least one house and a cigarette kiosk.

Last Thursday, three men on motorcycles in the nearby village of Sanhour hurled a firebomb at a guard at a Coptic church, killing him and injuring two others.

The incidents were the latest in a wave of violence directed at Christians in recent weeks that has authorities worried that Egypt, long an oasis of relative peace between Muslims and Christians in the turbulent Middle East, may be becoming--like nearby Lebanon--a new center of sectarian strife.

“These events constitute a new wave of escalation of religious-communal hostility . . . (that is) developing at an alarmingly rapid rate,” the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights complained earlier this month, citing examples of a “deteriorating climate of religious intolerance and communal hatred” in Egypt.

Government officials, in an emergency meeting with religious leaders late last month, vowed to clamp down on the violence. “I say it clearly,” Interior Minister Mohammed Abdel-Halim Moussa declared to Parliament. “When the choice before us is between the safety of dozens or hundreds of troublemakers and the safety of millions of citizens of this nation, we will not hesitate in choosing.”

Christian Copts, descendants of the church established by the Gospel writer St. Mark in Egypt in AD 40, now make up about 5 million to 6 million of Egypt’s 55 million population. The rest of the country is overwhelmingly Muslim.

The most serious outbreak of violence came last month in the Upper Egypt governorate of Minya, when hundreds of Muslim militants, armed with leaflets proclaiming “O Muslims, Wipe Off the Shame!” set fire to two churches, a youth club, three apartment buildings, a candy factory and several Christian-owned shops.

Government officials said the rioting started with a lurid rumor that Christian “crusaders” were having sex with young Muslim girls and filming them for pornographic videos. The extremist Gamaat Islamiya organization distributed flyers linking the rumors to heroin and plots by corrupt foreigners and declared: “We, the youth of the Gamaat Islamiya, have made a covenant with God to fight corruption and perversion from the Nazarenes until death.”

A total of 269 religious extremists were arrested in connection with the Minya attacks, and a senior security official said Friday that 98 have been arrested so far in Sannouris since the Easter Sunday rampage. Gamaat Islamiya has denied any responsibility for the incidents.

Maguid Mofied said he was awakened before dawn on Easter and told that his tiny market in Sannouris was on fire. When he arrived, he found that dozens of youths had punched through the front door, smashed the contents and set the shop ablaze. His Muslim neighbors were passing cans of gasoline to the attackers to keep the shop burning, he said.

“They were yelling ‘ Allahu Akhbar ,’ ” he said. “But of course, they are not good Muslims. Because there is nobody who says ‘ Allahu Akhbar ‘ and then destroys and burns.”

Next door, Mahfouz Habib Samaan, a 34-year-old science teacher, came home to the house he was decorating for himself and his fiancee and found the lower floor charred and covered with rubble. The decorative Coptic cross near the front door was caked with mud.

“Of course, I’m not thinking to marry now,” he said sadly. “Because it’s no longer safe. With this situation, for me, no problem. I can protect myself. I can jump from the roof. But my wife, and kids? What can they do?”

As a group of Christians gathered outside the damaged storefronts Friday afternoon, a white station wagon, its windows covered with newspapers, cruised slowly by and then came to a stop. A group of Muslims, dressed in the customary long robes and beards of the fundamentalists, got out and demanded to know what was happening.

When the Christians said they were describing the events of the past weekend, one of the Muslims shook his head and insisted that “kids” had been responsible for the attacks.

“Kids?” Samaan shouted. “Kids come to burn my house?”

“Yes,” one of the Muslims yelled back. “Everybody saw them. They are kids.”

“Kids don’t do this on their own,” someone else shouted. “Someone pushed them to do this. Who did this? Who pushed them?” A screaming match ensued that ended only when the Muslims rushed back to the car and sped off.

Afterward, Hamdi Anwar, a Muslim neighbor of Samaan’s, shook his head: “Relations between Muslims and Christians here are very good. We are neighbors--in the same building, on the same floor. These were individuals, not all Muslims.”

“Raping a girl who is 5 years old, Muslim or Christian, is unbelievable,” said an officer in Sanhour, thumbing through a Koran as he sat at his post. “It’s very bad. Nobody can agree with this. But our prophet said that the Coptics are the best friends for Muslims. We are brothers. Friends. I think whoever is behind this kind of violence is not Islamic, they’re not Coptic. It’s foreign planning somehow. They want to make another Lebanon.”