ISIS Murders Egyptian Copts

CAIRO — A video released Sunday night, Feb 15 2015 by the Islamic State appeared to show the mass beheading of at least a dozen Egyptian Christians by fighters in a recently formed Libyan arm of the militant group.

Identical in style and details to earlier execution videos released by the Islamic State, this one was the first the group has released depicting a killing outside of its core territory in Syria and Iraq. It appeared to show much closer communication and collaboration between the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and its far-flung satellite groups than Western officials previously believed.

The five-minute video, released by the terror group's propaganda wing al-Hayat Media, includes a masked English-speaking jihadi who says, "The sea you have hidden Sheikh Osama bin Laden's body in, we swear to Allah, we will mix it with your blood." Then on cue, all the victims are pushed to the ground and beheaded.

ISIS has imposed its brutal rule on the large areas of Iraq and Syria that it controls, but the beheadings of the Egyptians appears to have been carried out by an affiliate of the militant group in Libya.

Egypt's President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi confirmed in a statement that Egyptian "martyrs" had fallen victim to terrorism and expressed his condolences to the Egyptian people.

El-Sisi called for an urgent meeting of the Council of National Defense and declared seven days of official mourning.

Twenty-one Egyptian Christians were kidnapped in the Libyan coastal city of Sirte in two separate incidents in December and January. Officials said all of them had been killed. Text

Specific Hypothesis and Results

The GCP hypothesis is set for the last 6 hours of the UTC day, in lieu of any more accurate timing being available. The result is Chisquare 21807 on 21600 df, for p = 0.159 and Z = 0.997.

Interpretation

The following graph is a visual display of the statistical result. It shows the second-by-second accumulation of small deviations of the data from what’s expected. Our prediction is that deviations will tend to be positive, and if this is so, the jagged line will tend to go upward. If the endpoint is positive, this is evidence for the general hypothesis and adds to the bottome line. If the endpoint is outside the smooth curve showing 0.05 probability, the deviation is nominally significant. If the trend of the cumulative deviation is downward, this is evidence against the hypothesis, and is subtracted from the bottom line. For more detail on how to interpret the results, see The Science and related pages, as well as the standard caveat below.

Standard caveat

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every success might be largely driven by chance, and every null might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.