 After more than 3,000 mobsters surrounded and torched the houses of a small Shia community in a suburb of Giza in Egypt on 23 June 2013, and brutally lynched and subsequently desecrated the corpses of four Shia Muslim men, including the prominent cleric Sheikh Hassan Shehata, El-Nas ran interviews with sympathisers and inciters of the shocking hate crime during which they justified the extreme violence on the basis of purely subjective and unverified claims that carried no criminal charge under the Egyptian law.In its report, Amnesty International noted that the most recent incitement of violence against the Shia Muslim minority in Egypt prior to the incident took place at a Muslim Brotherhood rally "in support of the Syrian uprising" a week earlier attended by extremist Salafi sheikhs as well as the Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi.Commenting on the incident, Amnesty said "local residents had reported Salafi and other Islamist groups inciting hatred and violence against the Shi’a community over the past few weeks, including during Friday sermons, where they distributed pamphlets calling for their expulsion from the area" and criticised Morsi for “fail[ing] to disassociate himself and his government from the hatred and incitement against Shi’as.” During the conference held on 16 June, the report observed, top Salafi Sheikhs “used sectarian and inflammatory language to condemn attacks against Sunnis in Syria’s armed conflict.” In his own controversial condemnation of the attacks, Morsi had ignored the sectarian nature of the violence in Egypt, which has seen unprecedented levels of the persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, including Coptic Christians and Shia Moslems, after the Muslim Brotherhood took power in 2012.