Egypt Seeks 15 in Sharm El-Sheik Bombing
Police hunted at least 15 Islamic militants Wednesday for allegedly aiding the bombings in Sharm el-Sheik, and Egyptian officials said all were believed linked to another resort attack last fall while operating from a Sinai desert town.
As it pressed the search, the government found itself scrambling for new ways to combat what appears to be an organized, strong extremist network -- something senior officials long insisted had been stamped out in Egypt.
Prime Minister Ahmed Nazief said Wednesday the government would not be cowed by attacks, and he promised to boost security at Sharm, a resort popular with foreigners.
"We dont believe that we should let the terrorists have their way. I mean, this is exactly what they want us to do, to stay at home and be scared," Nazief said in a CNN interview.
The bombings that killed up to 88 people before dawn Saturday have raised concerns the governments past tactics against militants, including widespread arrests last fall in the Sinais vast deserts, did little to uproot support for religious extremists.
The list of suspects has at least 15 names of militants, who include Bedouin tribesmen and other natives of Sinai, said security officials, who agreed to discuss the list only if not quoted by name because they were not authorized to release the information.
Also on the list was Moussa Badran, a militant identified Tuesday by a DNA test as the alleged suicide attacker who rammed a pickup truck packed with explosives into Sharms Ghazala Gardens Hotel, the officials said.
They said most of those on the list were thought to have carried out, planned or prepared Saturdays attack and also had been connected to bombings last October at two Sinai resorts north of Sharm that killed 34 people, 11 of them Israelis.
The group was thought to be operating from the town of el-Arish, or villages around it, in northern Sinai near the Palestinian Gaza Strip, the officials said.
Investigators are also looking into the possibility that two tribal areas close to Sharm may have been used by the attackers, possibly to prepare the explosives. The two -- Rouessat and Khorum -- begin only a few miles outside the resort, but run deep into the mountains.
The security failures in Sharm were twofold:
First, militants were able to get 1,100 pounds of explosives into the heavily policed resort despite checkpoints.
Second, the governments nine months of security sweeps and hundreds of arrests since the October bombings apparently failed to rid the region of militants.
The government acknowledged that failure Monday, sacking Sinais two security chiefs and starting disciplinary procedures against at least a dozen police and security officers for dereliction of duty.
"They are mostly those on duty at the time of the bombings," said one of the security officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the investigation.
While investigators sought to determine the origin of the bombs used in the Sharm attack, the final leg of the explosives journey was likely to have been desert routes where security is thinly spread or doesnt exist at all.
Some of Sinais Bedouin still follow a nomadic lifestyle and pay little heed to official authority, living by tribal justice. Some grow illegal cannabis in isolated mountain valleys, while many live off smuggling, including sneaking illegal workers into Israel and weapons into the Gaza Strip.
"The Bedouin have always been something of a problem to authorities," said Claude Moniquet, a terrorism expert who heads the European Strategic, Intelligence and Security Center in Brussels, Belgium. "They smuggle anything and everything."
But any Bedouin involvement in the Sharm attack or Octobers bombings would most likely be for financial gain, not ideology, he said.
Until the bombings at Taba last fall and three attacks on foreign tourists in Cairo early this year, Egypt had enjoyed a reprieve from Islamic extremists since 1997.
But authorities publicly are sticking to the official position that no new wave of militants is emerging in Egypt.
They tied the October bombings to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and called the Cairo attacks the work of an isolated group of misguided youths. And they dismiss the idea the Sharm bombings might have been linked to Osama bin Ladens terror group even though both sets of Sinai attacks bore the hallmarks of al-Qaida operations.
Insurgents sought in the 1990s to topple President Hosni Mubaraks regime and replace it with a purist Islamic state. Their attacks on tourism were designed to drive visitors away and weaken the government by robbing it of needed foreign income.
Sending dozens of people to the gallows and jailing thousands without charge helped quell that violence. But the crackdown appears to have done little to uproot militancy in a nation of 72 million people that is beset by wide economic and social imbalances.
While generally moderate, many Egyptians are scornful of Western civilization, harbor hatred for the United States and are sympathetic toward the insurgency in Iraq.
"There are no moderate Islamists. There are only Muslims leading normal lives and terrorists," Mamoun Fandy, senior fellow at the Washington-based James Baker Institute for Public Policy, wrote this week in the London-based daily Asharq al-Awsat.
2005-07-12
