Don’t open the door, said a voice on the line. It was his friend, Atef, who was also cowering from the gang outside.
As footsteps approached, Mr Zekry sat waiting for the knock. It never came.
“We could hear they were about to break down the door,” he said. “But then a voice said, ‘We have enough, let's go…’ Then the footsteps retreated.”
That was January 4. Mr Zekry had just witnessed – and narrowly escaped – one of the most targeted acts of violence against Christians since the start of the Arab Spring, and the worst to befall them in Libya since it was liberated from the dictatorship of Col. Muammar Gaddafi.
That liberation came thanks to an alliance including secular activists, Islamist fighters, and the air forces of the western world. It is an alliance that has now fractured, a breach that is plunging the country into chaos.
The victims are ordinary Libyan people, who have been assassinated, shelled, and killed in the cross-fire of the Arab world’s latest civil war. But on this occasion, it was Egyptians, Coptic Christians trying to escape poverty back home and find work in their supposedly oil-rich neighbour, who were targeted.
"They knew who they wanted, and they asked for them by name,” said Mr Zekry, now back in his home village of Al-Our in central Egypt. “They had a list with all our names on it.”
He was lucky. Eyewitnesses saw fourteen other men led away in handcuffs. Their masked captors carried the black flag of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The group had only announced its existence in Libya a few weeks before – a nadir in the country’s descent into post-Gaddafi chaos.
Since then, the only sight the 14 men’s relatives have had of them is in three photographs released online by the militants, who call themselves the State of Tripoli – Isil’s local “provincial government”.
The photographs’ caption says the group has captured 21 Christian ‘crusaders’. It makes no threats, and no demands.
But they are unmistakably sinister. In two of the photographs, the men appear just as disembodied heads, photoshopped in a line against a black background.
In Mr Zekry’s home village of Al-Our, every Christian knows someone who they say was kidnapped by Isil. The 14 men snatched from alongside Mr Zekry all hailed from here.
“We were devastated,” said Malaka Ayad Rasmi, clutching a photograph of her husband, 35-year-old Tadros Youssef. “All we can do is pray for news.
As she spoke last week, the ramshackle room filled with people – mothers, brothers, small children, All have lost someone to the Libyan militants.
The story of the men from Al-Our is entwined with those of the region’s soured revolutions. They left Egypt, their families said, for a better life.
Four years after the overthrow of long-time ruler Hosni Mubarak, the country’s battle-scarred economy offered them little work, and Christian churches and shops in their governorate, Minya, had faced a series of high-profile sectarian attacks.
The journey out of poverty to Libya is one that many have made over the years. Every year, thousands of Egyptians are lured by the prospect of salaries up to seven times greater than the paltry sums they can command at home.
“What else was he expected to do? He’s a good father, and he wanted to support his family,” said Mrs Rasmi. “He was saving enough money to move out of his father’s one-room house – our children need a life.”
But for Tadros Youssef and the other villagers, the retreat from one political crisis led them straight into the jaws of another. Since the fall of Gaddafi in 2011, Libya has been a country divided and spiralling ever-further into chaos.
The hostages are among an estimated 150,000 migrant workers left in the country, out of what was once more than a million, many too scared or penniless to make the long journey home. The number of Egyptian Christians in Sirte and the surrounding areas has dropped from more than seventy to a mere handful.
While Libya’s UN-recognised government skulks in the eastern city of Tobruk, an Islamist-dominated interim assembly has clung on to power in Tripoli. It claims to be “moderate”, but it has maintained its alliance to radical militias over whose members it has little control.
Those militias are now fighting a battle for the future of Libya with “government” forces in the eastern city of Benghazi.
The most powerful group is Ansar al-Sharia, the militia accused of killing the American ambassador, Chris Steven, in a 2012 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi. It has come to dominate the town of Sirte, once the birthplace of Col Muammar Gaddafi, and now a militant stronghold, despite being the recipient of vast amounts of the dictator’s cash during his 42-year rule.
It was here that the men from Al-Our had ended up.
At first, survivors say, the group appeared not to pose too great a threat. “We used to know who we were dealing with – Ansar al Sharia knew who we were, but they never came for us,” Mr Zekry said.
The Egyptians, working as construction workers, had even been employed by members of the group on two occasions. When payment wasn’t forthcoming, they hadn’t dared to request it.
But then even more extreme fighters began to make their presence felt – some claiming allegiance to Isil. In late December, seven Egyptian Coptic Christians were abducted at a fake checkpoint as they tried to leave the town. They are presumed to be the remainder of the 21 claimed in the “State of Tripoli” statement.
As a small minority in majority-Muslim Libya, Christian groups have rarely been targeted en masse. But this time, the kidnapping came shortly after the murder of an Egyptian Coptic family in Sirte. Mr Zekry and his workmates made swift arrangement to flee, preparing for the perilous 600-mile journey along roads controlled by rival militias.
The trip was booked for Sunday 5 January. It was just a day before that, as the men were packing for the escape, that the jihadists struck.
"It is extremely disturbing to see a group of people being apprehended simply on the basis of their religion," said Hanan Salah, a Libya reseacher at Human Rights Watch. "We have seen this trend before – others have been killed, arrested or kidnapped merely for the possession of a Bible or just for being a Christian."
Mr Zekry’s eventual three-day journey home was an anxious one. Egypt is a key backer of the Libyan National Army, the official forces of the recognised government – and its citizens have suffered accordingly.
Human Rights Watch has previously documented an increase in what seems to be politically motivated mistreatment of Egyptians, both at checkpoints and in detention.
Three days after the attack, Coptic Christmas in Al-Our was a sombre affair. Congregants cried throughout what was a pared-down church service.
As they wait for news, many residents say they do not understand why the Egyptian government has not done more to help. Although President Abdel Fattah al Sisi says he has established a ‘crisis cell’ to deal with the problem, the families are in the dark over what it is doing.
They also feel abandoned by the outside world. “The world won’t pay attention to us – its mind is fixed on France,” said another man, the brother of another hostage, Bibawi Shafik, aged just 26.
It is not clear what the militants intend to do with their captives. They may be being held bargaining chips against further Egyptian involvement in the war – like the western hostages beheaded by their counterparts in Syria.
Wracked with guilt about the fate of his workmates, Mr Zekry has barely left the house since his return home.
“I know it could have been me in that picture,” he said, staring at the floor. “But I also knew the risks. Of course it’s dangerous out there, but look around you here – we have nothing.
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By Louisa Loveluck, and Magdy Samaan http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/11364924/Egyptian-Christians-wait-for-news-of-loved-ones-kidnapped-by-Isil.html
