Masked gunmen left four people dead outside a Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt on Sunday night, when the shooters turned automatic weapons on a wedding party gathered in Cairo.

Two young girls were among those killed, and all four of the slain were from one family, the Associated Press reports. Several thousand Christians gathered Monday for the funeral.

The assailants, who are suspected Islamic militants, shot randomly at the crowd before fleeing the scene, according to Reuters.

"It's God's will. They are always beating us down. Every other day now, they do this," Fahmy Azer Abboud, 75, told the AP before the funeral. Abboud's son, his wife's sister and two granddaughters aged 8 and 12 were the four left dead after the shooting.

"They were pure angels," he said of his granddaughters. "They had the world's kindness inside them. They helped me and shared with me everything they had."

The girls were waiting to enter the Church of the Virgin Mary in Cairo's Warraq district for the wedding of another of Abboud's granddaughters when the gunmen struck about 9 p.m. Sunday, according to the AP. The wounded included seven relatives, with his other son, Nabil, among them, Abboud said.

The shooting, which was the first such incident in the capital, has increased fear among Egypt's Coptic Christians, especially after the destruction of around 40 Coptic churches in August.

Constituting about 10 percent of Egypt's 85 million people, Coptic Christians have generally coexisted peacefully with majority Sunni Muslims for centuries, according to Reuters. But the army's overthrow of elected Islamist President Mohamed Mursi on July 3 has been followed by the worst attacks on churches and Christian properties in years.

Officials and Islamic religious leaders have publicly condemned the shooting, the AP reports.

Military-backed interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi vowed the attack would "not succeed in sowing divisions between the nation's Muslims and Christians."

The top cleric at Al-Azhar, the world's primary seat of Sunni Islamic learning, called the shooting "a criminal act that runs contrary to religion and morals."

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