POLICE IN EGYPT have arrested seventeen people in connection with the bombing of a church in Alexandra in the early hours of Friday morning, in which 21 people were killed.

The suicide attack on the church – which took place at 12:30am local time on Friday morning, as local Christians were leaving midnight mass – is injured a further 79 people, and is suspected to be the work of Al-Qaeda.

Ten of the seventeen have since been released, but the remaining seven remain in police custody.

The arrests came as police released footage of the explosion itself, the work of a suicide bomber in a car outside the building.

The bombing was criticised by president Hosni Mubarak in the immediate aftermath, and has since been condemned by the Pope, who labelled it a “vile gesture of death”.

“Yesterday we heard with great pain of the ferocious attack against the Christian Coptic community in Alexandria,” he said. “This vile gesture of death, like that of putting bombs near to the houses of Christians in Iraq to force them to leave, offends God and all of humanity, when just yesterday we prayed for peace and started the New Year with hope.”

Angela Merkel has also added her voice to those condemning the attack, saying Germany “condemns in the strongest terms these barbaric acts of terror, in which Christians but also Muslims lost their lives.”