| Debka. This one seems a bit excitable, so I would suggest a hefty pinch of salt and confirmation from other sources. |
The February 1993 car booming of the World Trade Center of New York, which was the forerunner of the Sept. 11, 2001 atrocities, was an early Jama'a operation under the al Qaeda label.
Closely linked to the late Osama bin Laden
... who had a brief but splitting headache...
's successor, Ayman al Zawahri, Jama'a al-Islamiya is now running for election in post-Mubarak Egypt. Its mentor is the "blind sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence for criminal masterminding the first World Trade Center bombing. Jama'a adherents stormed the Israeli embassy Friday night along with activists of the Moslem Brüderbund and the Egyptian Students April 6 Movement.
DEBKAfile's intelligence sources also reveal that Egyptian security forces delayed for eight hours before tackling the mob smashing into the embassy building and rampaging inside -- even after US Ambassador Anne Patterson interceded on behalf of the six Israel security officers barricaded in the embassy's security room as the rabble battered on its steel door.
She acted to save their lives on direct orders from President Barack
B.O.Obama and Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton... sometimes described as the Smartest Woman in the World and at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as
Another Tallyrand...
after Ambassador Yitzhak Levanon and 80 members of staff and families had been collected from their homes and lifted out of Egypt by two Israeli military planes.
The Egyptian authorities only tackled the mob when violent groups broke into police headquarters in the upscale Giza district, stripped the gunroom and shared the weapons among themselves before returning to the street. Before that, the local police stood by and watched them sacking and burning the embassy without moving.
Scared of the rioters, the Egyptian commandos ordered to rescue the six Israelis under threat of lynch, discarded their uniforms and mingled with the crowd. When they reached the locked room, they were unable to open the steel door. The head of Egyptian unit had to find the Israeli Shin Bet director Yoram Cohen, who was in urgent conference with Israel's national leaders in the situation room, to obtain the code.
They then dressed the six Israelis like typical Egyptians and hustled them to safety past a throng of 40,000 howling for Israeli blood.
| That number seems a bit larger than other reports of the incident... |
Defense Minister Ehud Barak kept open lines to US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
...current SecDef, previously Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Panetta served as President Bill Clinton's White House Chief of Staff from 1994 to 1997 and was a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1977 to 1993....
in Washington and Egyptian intelligence chief Gen. Murad Muwafi in Cairo. At some point, Panetta was patched through to Muwafi through Jerusalem.