Two weeks after coordinated bombings at several Red Sea resorts in Egypt, Israeli and Egyptian investigators have yet to assemble a clear picture of how the attacks occurred or identify the people or group behind them, according to officials who described a frustrating shortage of evidence, the same problem that plagued other major terrorism inquiries in the early stages.The Oct. 7 attacks along the Sinai Peninsula's rugged east coast killed 34 people, many of them Israeli tourists in the midst of a long holiday weekend. In the past two weeks, investigators from Egypt and Israel have pored over evidence from three crime scenes. Egyptian officials have questioned dozens of tribesmen from the remote desert region, which provided the attackers with vulnerable targets and a seemingly traceless escape.
Drawing on fragments of evidence and traits the case appears to share with large attacks in Africa and Europe since May 2003, Egyptian and Israeli investigators say they believe the Sinai bombings were carried out by Egyptians who belong to a previously unknown cell inspired by the global ambitions of al Qaeda and guided by experienced foreign militants. Those initial conclusions fit a pattern that emerged from investigations into bombings in Madrid, Istanbul and Casablanca, Morocco, but only after months of following leads that at various turns pointed to different organizations with vastly different motives. As in those cases, the first phase of the Sinai inquiry highlights how difficult investigating terrorism has become at a time when rising violence in the Middle East is moving scores of anonymous young men to take up arms against the United States and allied governments. "This is an octopus with al Qaeda at its heart," Col. Zohar Alafi, deputy director of the Israeli military's intelligence research division, said last week during a hearing of the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. "It is composed of independent cells whose common denominator is hatred of Jews and Christians and the desire to topple 'heretic regimes' that cooperate with the United States and Israel."