Egypt Arrests 7 in Bombing of Cairo Bazaar
CAIRO — Egyptian authorities said Saturday that they had arrested seven people connected with a terrorist cell affiliated with Al Qaeda that they said was responsible for bombing a popular tourist site in February, killing a French teenager.
The authorities said the bombing at the Khan al-Khalili bazaar was intended as the start of a campaign of terrorism aimed at destabilizing Egypt through attacks on oil facilities and tourist sites. They said the group, which they identified as the Islamic Army of Palestine, had also planned attacks outside of Egypt, including in France.
Egypt has a long history of battling radical Islamic militants, but in the past the militants were Egyptian radicals attacking the state. Officials said this case was the second in recent months in which they had caught foreigners planning attacks in the country.
“These infiltration attempts from abroad are new, and all their communication is carried out through the Internet,” said a general with the Interior Ministry who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss security issues. “I think it is a new phenomenon for Egypt.”
Security officials said they arrested seven suspects: two Palestinian men, a Belgian man of Tunisian origin, a British man of Egyptian origin, a French woman of Albanian origin and two Egyptian men. They said these seven were involved in planning the February attack, but were not the ones who carried it out.
In a lengthy statement, officials said that security agents infiltrated the cell, uncovered its sources of financing, deciphered its coded e-mail messages and identified its leaders. The statement said the leaders were two Egyptian fugitives, Ahmed Muhammad Sadiq and Khalid Mahmoud Moustafa.
The authorities said that Mr. Sadiq and Mr. Moustafa arranged for recruits to be smuggled through tunnels from Egypt into the Gaza Strip; the statement said they received advanced training there in terrorist techniques and then returned through the tunnels to carry out their attacks.
The group was able to buy weapons with money brought in from Europe.
Beyond the statement, the authorities provided no details or evidence to support the charges, eliciting some skepticism. Terrorism and security experts here said the account appeared tailored to meet the government’s immediate political needs.
On one hand, Egypt may be trying to rally international support by showing its ability to fight terrorism, they said.
But the government has also been under tremendous pressure at home and around the Islamic world for refusing to keep open its border with Gaza, a policy that it says is essential for security but that its critics charge is aimed at helping Israel. Recently, Egypt has moved aggressively to stop smuggling through the tunnels between Egypt and Gaza.
A domestic security threat involving Gaza could help the government justify its policies there.
The Gaza element was one reason Amr el-Shokaky, an expert in Islamic movements with the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies here, said the government account of the arrests appeared to be “politicized to some degree.”
“I can’t understand that there would suddenly be an Al Qaeda organization here, and they pointed to the tunnels without any prior indication,” he said.
Gen. Fouad Allam, a former director of state security, also expressed skepticism about the official account. He said that the bombing looked like the poorly planned work of amateurs, not Al Qaeda.
Last month, Egypt announced that it had broken up a cell of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, that had planned to carry out attacks on behalf of Iran and aimed at destabilizing Egypt.
Hezbollah admitted sending agents to Egypt but said their goal was to smuggle weapons to Gaza. As with this case, Egypt never said exactly when it made the arrests.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting.