Egyptian police said they have unearthed an Islamist trail behind last week's bombing in a busy Cairo bazaar that killed three foreigners, identifying the attacker as a teenage Islamist student.The bomber who blew himself up in the attack was identified as an 18-year-old Islamist, the interior ministry said, after DNA tests by police. It named him as Hassan Rafaat Hassan, an engineering student from Zagazig, northeast of Cairo.
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According to initial findings, a homemade bomb made up of TNT and nails exploded last Thursday as Hassan tried to plant it in an alleyway of ancient Islamic Cairo, near the famed Khan el-Khalili souk popular with tourists.
The interior ministry said there was still "no information on whether or not the perpetrator was connected to others" but said he had recently embraced "extremist ideas" which resulted in problems with his family.
Jaw fragments from the bomber's body were flung up on to a balcony by the force of the blast and his right arm was found some 20 metres (yards) away.
Police said three unnamed suspects "with Islamist leanings and motivations" had been arrested and appeared before an investigating magistrate on suspicion of helping to prepare the attack.
The group do not belong to any known Islamist organisation, said a police source, declining to be named. "The four individuals do not figure on any list of terrorists."
Prosecutors have described the attack as an "isolated act", indicating they believe the suspects were not working in concert with an extremist network like Al-Qaeda.
The blast was widely condemned and revived old fears of a fresh wave of terror attacks in Egypt, whose economy is heavily reliant on tourism.
An Internet statement issued on Friday by a previously unknown group called the Islamic Brigades of Pride in Egypt said it carried out the attack. Its authenticity could not be verified.
Egyptian fundamentalist group Jamaa Islamiya, which was behind a string of deadly attacks against foreigners in the 1990s but has since in theory renounced the use of violence, condemned the attack as irresponsible.
A founder of the movement, Nabil Naim, issued a statement from his prison cell to warn that such attacks could "damage the reputation" of Islam and send Egypt sliding into "a spiral of chaos and confusion". But Egyptian experts on Islamist groups said a new generation of militants could be taking over the reins, while Jamaa itself warned of the frustration stirred up among Muslims by events in Iraq and the Palestinian territories.