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| Africa: North |
| Egypt imposes media blackout on Sharm el-Sheikh bombings |
| 2005-08-25 |
| Egypt has imposed a media blackout on the probe into the July 23 bombings in Sharm El Sheikh after weeks of confusion and contradictory information on the country's deadliest attack by militants. Accustomed to such measures in a country that has been ruled by emergency laws since 1981, the Egyptian press on Thursday still carried an Arabic translation of a New York Times interview with Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif. "The reason for this is that the ban was announced after newspapers went to the printers," Hisham Kassem, editor of the independent Al Masri Al Yom daily, said. "But from now on we cannot publish anything. The rest of the world will be able to talk about this issue except for the people who are the most affected by it," he said. The interior ministry, meanwhile, said that two police officers were killed and two wounded in a blast on Thursday in the Jabal Halal region of northern Sinai. Police were hunting for "a criminal group implicated in the Sharm El Sheikh attacks and hiding out in the region", it said, referring to the July 23 bombings in the Red Sea resort. Attorney General Maher Abdel Wahed issued a decree on Wednesday banning coverage of the investigation into the Sharm bombings "in order to protect the work of the judiciary", a source in his office said. Nazif said that investigators were operating along two hypotheses for the multiple bombings that rocked Egypt's flagship resort at the height of the tourist season, The New York Times reported. One theory assumes that the Sinai Peninsula's bedouin population reacted to the crackdown that followed deadly October 7 attacks in Taba and two other neighboring Red Sea resorts. The other is that locals have developed ties with Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, but Nazif told the US daily that there was little evidence to back up this second theory. His comments were probably the most explicit by a high-ranking official on an investigation that has left the media scrambling for reliable sources of information. Even the death toll is not final more than a month after the bombings. Hospital officials on the scene gave a figure of 88, which the government later lowered to 67, including several foreigners. Foreign countries have announced the deaths of their nationals separately. The Egyptian authorities quickly pointed an accusing finger at the bedouin population, after initial suspicions had focused on a group of Pakistani nationals. Egyptian security officials also announced the arrest in northern Sinai of four men but did not elaborate on their alleged connection to the Sharm El Sheikh bombings. An interior ministry statement announced on Tuesday that "intensive efforts exerted recently have led to the capture of most suspects and yielded details on the terrorist attacks in the Sinai". Contradictory information filtering on vast security operations ongoing in the Sinai has only added to the confusion. Quoting security sources, Egypt's press reported several wounded in clashes between police and gunmen in the Sinai, but official sources in Cairo insisted that only two policemen were injured when a roadside bomb hit their vehicle. "What the authorities have released is only a tiny part of the information they have," said analyst Dhia Rashwan from the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "There is no security reason to justify the media blackout. This ban is a political decision. It does not aim to protect the investigation but to control public opinion," he said. Kassem said that the authorities were afraid that leaks on the perpetrators of the deadly bombings and the way that they were carried out could expose cracks in the state security apparatus. "The authorities want to avoid embarrassing leaks on those involved in the bombings ... But at the same time the media ban is also a way of concealing the state's failure to find the culprits," he said. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |