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Egypt detaining 3,000 over Red Sea resort bombings
| Either they're rooting out the entire Islamist infrastructure, or they've just rounded up a mob... |
 The Egyptian authorities have detained as many as 3,000 people after the bomb attacks in October that targeted Israeli holidaymakers at Red Sea resorts, according to local and international human rights groups. Security operations have centred on the North Sinai town of El Arish, home to a Palestinian man claimed by the authorities to have plotted and carried out the bombings, along with eight Egyptians.
| Sounds like they've arrested the entire population, to include suckling babes... |
Egyptian human rights activists and lawyers say detainees are being held in jails across the Sinai without access to lawyers or family members. In some cases they have been tortured, according to a statement by Amnesty International released this week.
| Damn. They didn't round up the Amnesia International guyz. Too bad... |
The large number of arrests raises questions about the official Egyptian version of events, which pinned responsibility for the attacks on a small group of mostly criminal and Bedouin elements from the Sinai region. Egypt's interior ministry said at the end of October that the group was stirred up by Israeli incursions into the occupied Palestinian territories and suggested they had acted independently of any wider terrorist network.
| Which of course don't exist in Egypt. |
Security officials have not responded to reports about further mass detentions, although the governor of North Sinai said they were part of continuing investigations. The mainly Bedouin inhabitants of the Sinai have no previous record of association with Islamic extremism, according to Diaa Rashwan, an expert at the Al Ahram Centre for Strategic and Political studies. Detainees include women and children held in an attempt to force a relative to turn himself in and others picked up randomly from outside mosques and on the streets, said Hafez Abu Saadeh, director of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights.
Posted by: Steve White 2004-12-01 |
