In his opening statement, Judge Mohammed Affify accused three priests in the predominantly Christian village of failing to stop the rioting.

During the mayhem, which erupted between December 31, 1999, and January 2, 2000, 21 Christians were killed and 260 of their homes and businesses destroyed or looted in El-Kosheh and surrounding villages in southern Egypt's Sohag governate. The only Muslim who died was shot accidentally by a fellow Muslim.

The trial began last June. Affify said in his verdict on February 5 that the three priests, named Gabriel, Bessada, and Isaac, "shoulder the moral responsibility for escalating the events," and he urged church authorities to discipline them.

In its formal verdict, the Sohag court acquitted all but four of the 96 suspects in the El-Kosheh trial, including seven defendants who had eluded arrest. A total of 57 Muslims were tried, 38 of them for murder. The most serious charges against the 32 Christian defendants were looting, arson, and attempted murder.

The El-Kosheh massacre was Egypt's worst clash in 20 years between the country's predominantly Muslim citizens and Coptic Christians, who constitute 10 percent of the population. It was preceded by a controversial murder investigation in the same village 16 months earlier, when police were accused of mistreating and torturing 1,000 Coptic villagers to force confessions implicating a Christian as the culprit.