Police are searching for more than a dozen Egyptians and local tribesmen believed to have played a direct role in the weekend terror attacks in this Red Sea resort, Egypt's deadliest ever, senior security officials said Wednesday. Egyptian police have come up with a list of 15 names believed connected to the three bombings, including a man identified as Moussa Badran, the suicide attacker who rammed a pickup truck packed with 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of into the reception of the Ghazala Gardens Hotel in Naama Bay.The officials, who declined to be identified because the release of the information had not been authorized, said the 15 people include Bedouin tribesman and Egyptians from the Sinai area. Few details were provided about those on the list, but most are believed to be at large and connected with last October's bombings of Sinai resorts farther north at Taba and Ras Shitan that killed 34 people, including many Israelis. The officials said the 15 either carried out, planned or prepared Saturday's three pre-dawn attacks on the Ghazala, a nearby car park and an area popular with local Egyptians some three kilometers (two miles) away called the Old Market. Hospital officials in Sharm put the death toll at 88, but the Health Ministry said 64 people were killed. The hospital said several sets of body parts have not been identified and at 10 Britons and several Italians have been reported missing by their government.
The hunt for the culprits has been focussing heavily on villages and towns in the northern Sinai, where people linked to the Taba blast hailed from and thousands of potential suspects or relatives took place, angering many in the local community. Security authorities are trying to find several Egyptian suspects who disappeared immediately after the October attacks and whose names have been mentioned in the investigations. Badran -- a resident of Sheik Zawaid, a town near el-Arish in northern Sinai -- fled his family house soon after the Taba attack, his stepmother, Mariam Hamad Salem al-Sawarka, told The Associated Press. Many of his relatives -- including women -- were arrested and tortured after he disappeared while another brother remains in custody, said al-Sawarka. Hours after the Sharm blast, police took DNA samples from Badran's father and siblings and from other families with relatives who have gone into hiding since October.
Security forces have taken at least 140 people in for questioning since Saturday's attacks, including 70 on Tuesday. An unspecified number of people were arrested overnight in the villages of Husseinat and Muqataa near the Gaza border. Investigators are concentrating on the theory that the bombings were carried out by Egyptian militants, but were not excluding the possibility they received international help, the security officials in Cairo said. They noted there has been an increasing number of hard-line Islamists in Sinai who may have formed cells. In previous years, the sparsely populated peninsula saw little militant activity, in contrast to the Nile Valley where the majority of Egyptians live and where an Islamic insurgency took hold in the 1990s. Investigators were looking closely at funding for Islamists in Sinai, possibly from abroad. Large sums have come into the area in recent years, and no one is sure of the source, one of the officials in Cairo said.
Authorities are also trying to learn the origin of the more than 1,100 pounds (495 kilograms) of explosives used in the Sham attacks. Police said they were exploring the possibility they may have been brought in from Jordan, Saudi Arabia or Israel. Another possibility was that the bombs were made of old explosives or from explosives used in quarries and hoarded by Sinai's Bedouin inhabitants