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| Africa: North |
| Egyptians still hunting Sharm el-Sheikh boomers |
| 2005-08-24 |
| Sweeping through the craggy mountains of northern Sinai, Egyptian security forces have continued to arrest suspects as part of their effort to determine if the attack on Sharm el Sheik last month was solely the work of local citizens or if there was some link to international terrorist groups, government officials said. After the operation Tuesday, the authorities said they were confident that they had caught, killed or at least identified the group of people who executed the attack that rocked the Egyptian beach resort of Sharm el Sheik on July 23. The bombings there killed at least 68 people and undermined tourism, a cornerstone of the national economy. Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif said the authorities were still working with two theories concerning who was actually behind the attack. One theory holds that security forces were so aggressive after the bombing attack on a resort in Taba in October that locals became infuriated and retaliated with strikes against Sharm el Sheik. The other, he said, is that local people were somehow linked to international terrorist groups, like Al Qaeda. "I don't think that we have enough evidence to prove the second assumption," Nazif said in an interview on Monday. "So for now we are taking things as they really look and looking at the people living there." What that means, the prime minister said, is the government will not only address the attack from a security perspective, but will also examine social factors in the northern Sinai region, which may have contributed to inspiring young people to become suicide bombers. The northern Sinai is far more economically depressed than the south, which has benefited from tourism-related investments around Red Sea resorts. In the north, residents do not even have access to fresh water in their homes; salty water runs from their taps. "We have people here who trained to become suicide bombers in Sinai, and that's something that we should not take lightly," Nazif said. "We need to see why this happened and how this happened. Is it just people frustrated, or are they people with connections?" Egypt, like Jordan, which this week announced the arrest of suspects in connection with a failed missile attack on an American naval ship in the southern port city of Aqaba on Friday, is trying to figure out the extent to which foreign terrorist organizations may have infiltrated its territory. In Jordan, where the authorities say the rocket attack has been linked to the Iraqi insurgency, the question remains to what extent outsiders have managed to infiltrate the country. In Egypt, the question of who is to blame is perhaps more problematic, because the local ringleaders - and suicide bombers - were all Egyptian, although the tactic of suicide bombing has not been employed in Egypt in the past, officials said. "Somebody has received and trained them and used them, and this is a process we need to deal with," Nazif said. When suicide bombers attacked the resort in Taba, which sits on the border with Israel, it was perceived as a strike against Israelis, and therefore as an extension of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Afterward, Egypt's security forces swept through the region in force, detaining about 3,000 people, many for no reason other than that they had some relation to a suspect. In July, when Sharm el Sheik was attacked, the police quickly concluded that the two strikes were linked because tactics were similar and the suspects came from the same general areas. Two men accused of taking part in the Taba attacks, and who are now on trial in Cairo, continue to deny their involvement - which has added further uncertainty to the case since terrorists often take credit for their work, especially if they have acted in the name of religion, experts on militant groups in Egypt said. The Ministry of the Interior, which oversees national security, announced Monday that as part of its inquiry into the attacks, thousands of security agents swept through the region. It declined to give details about what it had learned or how many arrests were made. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |