Christians in churches in Cairo, the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and Tanta in the Nile Delta.

Those attacks left at least 100 people dead and led to tighter security around Christian places of worship and Church-linked facilities. They have also underlined the vulnerability of minority Christians in a country where many Muslims have since the 1970s grown religiously conservative.

The Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, said Friday’s attackers used secondary dirt roads to reach the buses carrying the pilgrims, who were near the monastery at the time of the attack. Only pilgrims have been allowed on the main road leading to the monastery since last year’s attack.

The Interior Ministry maintained that only one bus was attacked, but the latest statement by the church said three buses were targeted andput the death toll at 7 and the wounded at 19, including two in critical condition.

The Interior Ministry said police were pursuing the attackers, who fled the scene.

Egypt’s Christians, who account for some 10 percent of the country’s 100 million people, complain of discrimination in the Muslim majority country. Christian activists say the church’s alliance with el-Sissi has offered the ancient community a measure of protection, but failed to end frequent acts of discrimination that boil over into violence against Christians, especially in rural Egypt.

In Minya, the scene of Friday’s attack, Christians constitute the highest percentage of the population – about 35 percent – of any Egyptian province.