BEIT ALLAM, Aug 11: A few traces of dried blood and broken glass on a village street were the only reminders on Sunday of the explosion of vengeance which felled 22 members of a single family the previous day.

A ghostly silence enveloped this small farming community of some 15,000 souls as residents bolted themselves up in their homes for fear the killings would unleash a new spiral of violence.

Even here in Upper Egypt where vendetta is a long-established tradition, villagers were at a loss to explain the hatred which had prompted a handful of gunmen from the Abdel Haleem family to mount the deadly ambush against their bitter rivals the Hanashats on Saturday morning.

“Nobody imagined it would come to this,” said mayor Abdel Qader Mustafa as some 30 riot police, armed with Kalashnikovs, patrolled his village amid the maize fields, some 400 kilometres south of Cairo.

“We must at all costs prevent things from degenerating,” he told AFP.

“We must try to mediate but nothing will be possible for a month. The anger is very high among the Hanashats. They refuse to receive condolences.

“Once the Hanashats are better disposed, we will bring notables, religious leaders, deputies, to help sort things out.”

The family lost most of their menfolk when the gunmen opened fire on two minibuses taking them to the provincial capital of Sohag on Saturday for the trial of two relatives accused of the April murder of an Abdel Haleem.

Just three men survived the ambush by ducking down in their seats — 21 adults and an eight-year-old boy were killed in what authorities described as the worst vendetta in Egypt in nearly a decade.

Neighbours said that anxious police had denied the Hanashats the opportunity to hold a funeral — officers quietly buried the bodies of the dead overnight without any family present.

Riot police set up checkpoints outside the homes of both families and closely monitored all coming and goings.

Neighbours said that only women were left inside the Abdel Haleem household — the men had all long since fled into dusty hills above the village for fear of being picked up by police.

A police source identified five of the gunmen later on Sunday as: Sami Taher Mahmud, Mamduh Amin Mahmud, Mohammed Abdel Shafi Mahmud, Mamduh Tamam Abdul Rahim and his father Tammam Abdul Rahim.

Villagers said the hatred between the Abdel Haleems and the Hanashats went back well over a decade.

There was no communal dimension to the rivalry in a region long marred by attacks on the Coptic Christian minority.

“It all started with disputes between children, during a marriage. They used to accuse each other of being hooligans,” villager Nageh Amin recalled.

“Then when they grew up, they started killing each other.”

In April, when an Abdel Haleem was murdered, suspicion immediately fell on two Hanashats — Helmi Ahmed and Ali Mahmoud — who were known to have sworn revenge for the killing of a Hanashat 11 years ago.

The pair were arrested and their trial was due to open in Sohag on Saturday, but the Abdel Halems took the law into their own hands first.—AFP