Cairo clashes (file)
Cairo clashes (file)AFP photo

Three people, including a girl aged eight, died when gunmen on motorcycles opened fire on a wedding party outside a Coptic Christian church in Cairo on Sunday.

At least nine others were wounded in the attack in the Giza neighborhood of the city, officials said, according to the BBC.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. The unidentified attackers fired indiscriminately as people left the church. A man and a girl were killed outside the church and a woman died on her way to hospital.

Coptic priest Thomas Daoud Ibrahim told Reuters he was inside the church when the gunfire erupted.

Another priest, Beshay Lotfi, told Egyptian media that the church had been left without a police guard since the end of June.

Egypt's Coptic Christian community makes up around 10% of the country's  90 million-strong population.

Copts are indigenous to Egypt, their presence predating the Arab conquests of northern Africa. Egyptian Copts have long complained of widespread discrimination, persecution and violence by both the Egyptian state and Islamist non-state actors.

Anti-Christian violence has seriously escalated in the aftermath of the removal of Islamist Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, whose supporters have been accused of scapegoating the Coptic community, after its leader, Pope Tawadros II, came out in support of the move by the army to oust Morsi.

A number of Christians have been murdered, and scores of churches and Christian-owned houses and businesses have been torched, ransacked and vandalized in the weeks since Morsi's removal.