 Egyptian security forces on Friday arrested a man and a woman on suspicion of involvement in bloody bomb attacks last month in the resort city of Sharm el-Sheik. The two were captured separately after a gunbattle in which two police officers were wounded when authorities raided the Sinai hideout of the bombing suspects, some 15 miles east of the Suez Canal city of Ismailiya, the interior ministry said. The woman was captured with an automatic weapon after others in the group escaped the police ambush and fled into the rugged Sinai mountains, the ministry said in a statement. Hours later the man was caught trying to dodge a checkpoint near a tunnel under the Suez Canal.| There are tunnels under the Suez Canal? |
Egyptian investigators were focusing on the likelihood that homegrown Islamic militant cells based in the Sinai, possibly with international links, carried out the July 23 Sharm el-Sheik attacks, in which two car bombs and a bomb in a knapsack ripped through a luxury hotel, a neighborhood full of Egyptians and the entrance to a beach promenade. |