Thousands of Egyptian mourners marched behind the coffin of a woman who is being called the "martyr of the head scarf" on Monday — a pregnant Muslim woman who was stabbed to death in a German courtroom as her young son watched.

Many in Marwa al-Sherbini's homeland of Egypt were outraged by the attack and saw the low-key response in Germany as an example of racism and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Al-Sherbini's husband was critically wounded in the July 1 attack in Dresden when he tried to intervene; he was stabbed by the attacker and accidentally shot by court security.

"There is no god but God and the Germans are the enemies of God," chanted the mourners in the 32-year-old woman's hometown of Alexandria, where her body was buried after being flown back from Germany.

"We will avenge her killing," her brother Tarek el-Sherbini told The Associated Press by telephone from the mosque where prayers were being recited in front of his sister's coffin. "In the West, they don't recognize us. There is racism."

Al-Sherbini, who was about four months pregnant and wore the Islamic head scarf, was involved in a court case against a neighbour who had called her a terrorist. She was set to testify against him when he stabbed her 18 times inside the courtroom in front of her three-year-old son.

Husband mistaken for attacker

Her husband, who was in Germany on a research fellowship, came to her aid and was also stabbed by the neighbour as well as shot in the leg by a security guard who initially mistook him for the attacker, German prosecutors said. He is now in critical condition in a German hospital, according to al-Sherbini's brother.

"The guards thought that as long as he wasn't blond, he must be the attacker, so they shot him," al-Sherbini told an Egyptian television station.

The attacker, who has been identified only as 28-year-old Alex W., remains in detention and prosecutors have opened an investigation on suspicion of murder.

Christian Avenarius, the prosecutor in Dresden where the incident took place, described the killer as driven by a deep hatred of Muslims. "It was very clearly a xenophobic attack of a fanatical lone wolf."

He added that the attacker was a Russian of German descent who had immigrated to Germany in 2003 and had expressed his contempt for Muslims at the start of the trial.

'Incomprehensibly meagre' coverage criticized

At its regular news conference on Monday, German government spokesman Thomas Steg said if the attack was racist, the government "naturally condemns this in the strongest terms."

The killing has dominated Egyptian media for days, while it has received comparatively little coverage in German and Western media.

A German Muslim group criticized government officials and the media for not paying enough attention to the crime.

"The incident in Dresden had anti-Islamic motives. So far, the reactions from politicians and media have been incomprehensibly meagre," Aiman Mazyek, the general secretary of the Central Council of Muslims, told Berlin's Tagesspiegel daily.