| Egypt asks Hamas for information on Sinai attackers |
CAIRO Egypt has asked Gaza’s Hamas rulers for information on three members of an Islamist group suspected of involvement in a deadly attack on a military outpost, a senior security official said on Saturday.
He said Egyptian authorities had received a list of nine suspects from Israel, and asked the Hamas to provide information on three of the men.
They are believed to be affiliated with the Army of Islam, a small radical Islamist group which Egypt has blamed for several attacks in past years.
The Egyptian military has been bolstering its presence in the Sinai with tanks and helicopters after Sunday’s unprecedented ambush on a border guard outpost near the borders of Gaza and Israel.
It said the attack took place under the cover of mortar fire from Gaza, but witnesses said they heard only rifle fire. The attackers commandeered a military vehicle into Israel but were killed in an Israeli helicopter strike. The military and state media said on Wednesday that it killed 20 militants out its first air strikes in Sinai since it regained the peninsula in a 1979 peace treaty with Israel.
Residents in the villages where the airstrikes took place denied anyone had been killed.
The massacre on Sunday, as the neighbours describe it, sent shockwaves across Egypt and prompted the army to launch an unprecedented operation to flush out Islamist militants from the lawless peninsula.
Helicopters crisscross the skies as military trucks haul tanks to the area near the borders with Israel and Gaza in preparation for what the military says will be a decisive confrontation with the militants.
Authorities believe the militants are radical Bedouins and suspect the involvement of extremists in Gaza. The military and police have already boasted successes, claiming the killing of 20 militants in air strikes — the first in the Sinai for decades — and the arrest of six “terrorists.”
But the claims meet with scepticism from villagers who charge that the security forces missed their elusive quarry, who simply melted away into the vast mountainous desert.
Instead the security forces resorted to the arbitrary tactics of the ousted regime of Hosni Mubarak, fanning longstanding grievances against the central government, villagers say.
In Tumah, a small village of sparse brick homes where the air strikes against the militants were reported to have taken place on Wednesday, residents said the military’s claims were pure propaganda.
There was indeed a site, on the village’s outskirts, which the militants used as a training base, said one resident of the area, Eid Sawairka.
The militants were long gone when armoured personnel vehicles raided the village backed by helicopter gunships, he said.
Agencies
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