Parents Mourn Photographer Killed in Cairo

Last Updated, Saturday, 11:09 a.m. The parents of Ahmed Assem, a 26-year-old photographer for a Muslim Brotherhood newspaper who was killed on Monday in Cairo shortly after recording video of an army sniper, described their grief in an emotional interview broadcast by CNN on Friday.

CNN interviewed the parents of a photographer for an Islamist newspaper who was killed on Monday just after recording an army sniper during clashes in Cairo.

Mr. Assem's father, a doctor who did not share his Islamist politics, conducted his son's autopsy and described the fatal gunshot wound. The young man's mother said that she had warned him of the danger posed by his work, but her son had insisted that he was not afraid of death and was driven by an urge to uncover the truth.

His family also spoke to Leila Fadel, National Public Radio's Cairo bureau chief. Her audio report, posted on the broadcaster's Web site Friday, included comments from the dead man's older brother, Eslam, a police officer who told The Lede earlier this week that the family would pursue legal action against the sniper whose image was captured on video.

Despite political differences that caused the brothers to stop speaking during the recent upheaval in Egypt, Eslam Assem posted an image on Facebook on Friday showing a graffiti tribute to his dead brother that called him a martyr.

An image of a graffiti tribute to Ahmed Assem, a photographer for a Muslim Brotherhood newspaper who was killed on Monday in Cairo, posted on Facebook by his brother.

In a discussion of Mr. Assem's death online Friday, Egyptians who are even more skeptical of the Brotherhood's ideology pointed to disparaging remarks about Egypt's Coptic Christians posted on the young man's Facebook page just two days before his death.

In a note apparently motivated by the conspiracy theory that Christians had played an important role in the overthrow of the Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, Mr. Assem attacked the Coptic pope, Tawadros II, who was present (along with a senior Muslim cleric) when the president's removal was announced at the defense ministry last week.

As the British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr explained, the note was addressed to “Nazarenes” - a term frequently used by Egyptian Islamists to refer to followers of Jesus of Nazareth, but “associated with sectarian rhetoric” and considered deeply insulting. According to a translation circulated by Ms. Carr, the note read:

Morsi had kept a lot of catastrophes away from you, and with your stupidity you've lost the chance to live safely. Take this, cowards; Tawadros threw you into the fire. So you may understand that your safety lies in the application of Islam, not fighting it. You are the first to lose.