The thwarted attack renewed fears for Aleppo’s Christian community [Getty file image]
An attempt to bomb an Orthodox Christian cathedral in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo was thwarted on Wednesday.
The Syriac Orthodox Archdiocese of Aleppo said that the attempt to attack the Saint Ephrem Syriac Orthodox Cathedral in the Suleimaniyah area of Aleppo involved an explosive device, which was discovered inside a funeral vehicle entering the Cathedral grounds.
According to a statement published on the Archdiocese’s official Facebook page, the incident occurred on Wednesday morning when a funeral vehicle belonging to a service office in Aleppo was transporting the body of a deceased member of the congregation to the cathedral for funeral prayers.
Before entering, a “small strange object wrapped in a black bag and tightly sealed with transparent adhesive tape” fell from the vehicle.
According to the statement, the church guard initially believed the object belonged to the funeral vehicle, but the driver denied any knowledge of it, prompting a traffic police officer to call for intervention by security forces.
The Archdiocese added that security forces quickly closed roads around the cathedral after suspecting that the object might be explosive.
A specialised engineering unit later arrived, examined and handled the object professionally, and removed it from the location. The statement added that surveillance camera footage showed that the suspicious object had fallen from the funeral vehicle itself, which had been parked overnight on a nearby street.
The incident has sparked renewed fears about the safety and security of churches and the Christian community in Syria.
There have been several incidents in Aleppo since the fall of the regime of deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad.
On New Year’s Eve, a suicide bomber killed one police man and injured several others in the city. He was reportedly on his way to a church in the Bab al-Faraj area of central Aleppo before attacking security forces instead.
In June last year, a suicide attack on the Saint Elias Church in the Dweila area of Damascus killed 25 worshippers and injured around 60 others, in one of the deadliest attacks on the Christian community in Syria ever.