The news came as Egyptian authorities imposed a media blackout on the probe into the July 23 bombings in Sharm al-Sheikh after weeks of confusion and contradictory information on the country's deadliest attack by militants.Major General Mahmoud Adel and Lieutenant Colonel Omar Abdel-Moneim were the highest-ranked police officers killed in Egypt since a violent Islamist insurgency in the mid-1990s and the first slain since about 4,000 security personnel launched a massive sweep Sunday of the northern Sinai for suspects linked to July's attacks and October's bombings at the Taba and nearby Ras Shitan resorts. Yesterday's blasts occurred after two land mines exploded on the 1,800-meter-high Halal mountain, about 60 kilometers south of the Mediterranean coastal town of Al-Arish, the Interior Ministry said. The statement did not say if the mines had been planted by suspected militants or left over from previous Arab-Israeli wars. But at least two security officials said initial investigations indicated that fugitives hiding out on the mountain had concealed the mines. The first mine exploded as a bulldozer was clearing a path in the mountain for two vehicles carrying Adel, Moneim and several other security personnel, said the officials. The second detonated after the officers got out of their vehicle to inspect the scene of the first blast.
| In that case they're not leftovers. |
Police have been scouring northern Sinai's deserts and jagged mountains and storming suspected militant strongholds for those behind the terrorist attacks. At least 650 people have been detained since Sunday.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Maher Abdel-Wahed issued a decree on Wednesday banning coverage of the investigation into the Sharm al-Sheikh bombings "in order to protect the work of the judiciary," a source in his office said. Accustomed to such measures in a country which has been ruled by emergency laws since 1981, the Egyptian press still carried an Arabic translation of a New York Times interview with Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif. "The reason for this is that the ban was announced after newspapers went to the printers," Hisham Kassem, editor of the independent Al-Masri al-Yom daily said. "But from now on, we cannot publish anything. The rest of the world will be able to talk about this issue except for the people who are the most affected by it," he said.
Nazif said investigators were operating along two hypotheses for the multiple bombings which rocked Egypt's flagship resort at the height of the tourist season, the New York Times reported. One theory assumes that the Sinai Peninsula's bedouin population reacted to the crackdown that followed deadly October 7 attacks in Taba and two other neighboring Red Sea resorts. The other is that locals have developed ties with Al-Qaeda network, but Nazif told the U.S. daily there was little evidence to back up this second theory. His comments were probably the most explicit by a high-ranking official on an investigation which has left the media scrambling for reliable sources of information. Even the death toll is not final more than a month after the bombings. Hospital officials on the scene gave a figure of 88, which the government later lowered to 67, including several foreigners. Foreign countries have announced the deaths of their nationals separately.
"What the authorities have released is only a tiny part of the information they have," said analyst Dhia Rashwan from the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "There is no security reason to justify the media blackout. This ban is a political decision. It does not aim to protect the investigation but to control public opinion," he said.
Kassem said authorities were afraid that leaks on the perpetrators of the deadly bombings and the way they were carried out could expose cracks in the state security apparatus. "The authorities want to avoid embarrassing leaks on those involved in the bombings ... But at the same time the media ban is also a way of concealing the state's failure to find the culprits," he said.