Signs of the Times

Three Killed, Seven Injured in Two Cairo Attacks
By Tom Perry and Edmund Blair
Sat Apr 30, 2005 02:01 PM ET

CAIRO (Reuters) - A bomber and two veiled women attacked tourists in separate incidents in Cairo on Saturday, targeting people near a popular museum and a bus in the south of the city, official sources said.

An Egyptian man, probably the bomber, and the two women were killed, they said. Seven people were injured near the Egyptian museum, a key tourist attraction for its pharaonic treasures, in what Cairo's security chief said was a suicide attack.

Those injured in the bombing were three Egyptians, an Israeli couple aged 60 and 55, an Italian man aged 26, and a Swedish man aged 28, the Interior Ministry said.

In the bus attack -- the first in living memory by women in Egypt -- the two veiled women opened fire at the back window of a tourist coach, the Interior Ministry said. No one in the bus was hit but shattered glass from a windshield lay on the road.

Two bombings in the last seven months have had little effect on Egypt's tourism industry, which brought in $6.6 billion in 2004, a record year with more than eight million tourists, but economists say a string of attacks could hit Egypt hard.

Health Minister Mohamed Awad Tag el-Din said the injured had superficial wounds caused by nails which witnesses said were in the bomb. He said most of the wounded were in good condition, except for the Swede, whose wounds were "moderate."

"They are in stable condition in hospital," added Tourism Minister Ahmed el-Maghrabi.

The two veiled woman, identified by the Interior Ministry as the bomber's sister Negat Yousri and his girlfriend Iman Ibrahim Khamees, attacked on the Salah Salem highway, one of the main arteries through the south of the city.

The ministry said Negat committed suicide. Khamees died in hospital of her wounds but it was not clear who shot her.

It said the man who blew himself up was Ihab Yousri Yassin, a fugitive member of the group which planned an April 7 bombing which killed three tourists in a Cairo bazaar.

It said he had jumped from the bridge into the square below, where he detonated the bomb. "They found his papers, and the identity card of the perpetrator of the Azhar (bazaar) incident," the ministry said in a statement.

Police have arrested in the last few hours the two other fugitive members of the group, named as Ashraf Said Youssef and Gamal Ahmed Abdel-Aal, the ministry added.

Other security sources said someone had thrown a bomb from a bridge which passes behind the museum.

Two groups -- the Mujahideen of Egypt and the Martyr Abdullah Azzam Brigades -- said on an Islamist Web site that their people carried out the attacks. It was not possible to verify their authenticity and some of the details of their claims did not appear to match witness accounts.

Behind the museum, the body of the dead man lay on its back in a pool of blood under the bridge. His head was blown apart but the rest of his body was apparently intact. He was wearing a light blue shirt and dark trousers, a Reuters journalist said.

Police gathered together pieces of his head and laid a newspaper on the street to soak up the blood.

At the scene of the shooting attack in south Cairo, witnesses saw shattered glass, blood on the street, newspaper to soak it up, a pistol and what appeared to be a pair of black gloves of the type worn by veiled women.

The April 7 bombing was the most serious in the Nile Valley since 1997. But in October last year, a group led by a Palestinian attacked Red Sea resorts frequented by Israelis, killing 34 people.

Diaa Rashwan, an analyst of violent Islamist groups, said: "It seems like we are talking about a small group of family and friends carrying out these attacks ... These people have no real organization. They are motivated by anger. It's difficult for the security people to find out much about them."

Comment: It's difficult for Egyptian security to find out much about these organisations because, in all likelihood, they do not exist as they are portrayed. Putin's recent visit to Egypt and Israel has done much to legitimise the Palestinian cause and, as a result, dealt a blow to Israel and the US' attempts to demonise all Arabs as terrorists in the mind of the world public. Israel has a track record of staging phony Islamic terror attacks at such moments. Egyptian police would therefore be much better advised to look towards Israel for the culprits.

Interestingly, both of the two previous "Islamic terrorist" attacks in Egypt that are mentioned in the above report were probably carried out by by Israeli agents. As we wrote at the time of the Sinai bombing last October:

Since the concept of government deception is a hot topic these days, we would like to highlight a very pertinent recent event. On Thursday night, 3 car bombs exploded at an Egyptian Red Sea resort, less than a mile from the heavily guarded Israeli border. The attack occurred in the same week that Israel was being mildly chastised (for that is the extent of any rapprochement of Israeli actions these days) by Western governments for its child killing spree in Gaza. Coincidence? Clearly not. Not surprisingly, Israel and the US blamed the attacks on the mythical "al-Qaeda"
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