200 held after Cairo bombs
2005-05-01 14:43
Cairo - Police temporarily detained about 200 people on Sunday from the home villages of the three people responsible for a bomb blast and tour bus shooting near Cairo tourist sites the day before.
The records of the detainees, from the villages of al-Ammar and Ezbet al-Gabalawi north of Cairo, are being examined for any connections with local terror networks, police said.
On Saturday afternoon, a man identified as a suspect in an April 7 bombing blew himself up as he leapt off a bridge during a police chase, officials said. Less than two hours later, two veiled women - reportedly the man's sister and fiancee - attacked a tour bus. Egyptian police officials and the government-guided Al-Ahram newspaper said the bus was carrying Israeli tourists.
Nine people, four of them foreigners, were wounded in the apparent revival of violence against Egypt's vital tourism industry.
Small militant cell
Egyptian authorities denied major militant groups have returned to the violence that plagued the country during a bloody campaign by Islamic extremists in the 1990s. They said Saturday's violence was a result of the government crackdown on a small militant cell it says carried out the April 7 suicide bombing near a Cairo tourist bazaar that killed two French tourists and an American.
Tourism is Egypt's biggest foreign currency earner, and the industry had made a strong recovery after the 1990s violence.
In an official statement ib Sunday, the opposition Al-Ghad Party said the violence was the result of the "environment of oppression and depression", a reference to the emergency laws the country has lived under since 1981. Opposition groups have repeatedly called on President Hosni Mubarak to revoke the laws.
The statement said Egyptian security should be monitoring terrorist cells and preventing such attacks and called for interrogation of Interior Minister Habib al-Adly concerning the attacks.
- AP