Egypt Gets Tough in Sinai In Wake of Resort Attacks

The Israelis also said a senior leader of the bombers, Khaled Musaid, who was killed Wednesday, was an Egyptian from the city of Ismailiya, not a Sinai Bedouin, suggesting he might have operated on behalf of other Egyptian groups or a foreign organization.

North Sinai is notable for its long, golden stretches of Mediterranean beach, rugged interior and popular resentment toward the central government. Smugglers ferry drugs, weapons and prostitutes to and from the Israeli border. Resentment over underdevelopment and recent security crackdowns runs deep, as evidenced by complaints about the Egyptian leadership's interference in local affairs and accusations that it disdains the population.

"There is no doubt that the sons of Sinai are angry with Cairo," said Ashraf Ayoub, a member of the Committee to Protect North Sinai, a nongovernmental organization that has mounted demonstrations against Egypt's relations with Israel and the U.S. war in Iraq. "Egypt doesn't consider us part of the nation."

"We are angry, angry, angry -- angry about Palestine, angry about Iraq and angry about the Egyptian dictatorship," said Khaled Arafat, a local political activist.

Sinai was under Israeli occupation for 15 years after the 1967 Middle East war, and Egyptian officials have accused the peninsula's Bedouins, thousands of whom live in and roam the hardscrabble interior, of excessive accommodation to the invaders. "Police from Egypt have always been suspicious of north Sinai and, in turn, the people are suspicious of them. Loyalty to the state is low," said Bashir Abdel Fattah, a historian and expert on Sinai society. "The question is how to avoid war in the Sinai. But the crackdown only makes people more resentful."

In the Taba and Sharm el-Sheikh plots, the Interior Ministry says, Sinai Bedouins provided hard-core Egyptian Islamic militants with explosives available from quarries in the area, as well as with weapons and even land mines left over from the '67 war. At Halal Mountain, Egyptian officials identified a tribal leader named Salem Shonoubi as the prime protector of the Taba and Sharm el-Sheikh suspects. Recently, a mine blew up a vehicle carrying troops in pursuit of suspects and their supporters and killed one police officer and an informer. Explosives of the type used in Taba and Sharm el-Sheikh also killed a pair of soldiers in a roadside blast near Halal. The Israelis say Shonoubi was a key planner of the attacks.

Egyptian police used massive roundups to net a few key suspects, a typical crackdown tactic in Egypt. They put women in detention in hopes of luring husbands to give themselves up. Several detainees told Human Rights Watch, the New York-based watchdog group, that they were tortured during interrogation. As recently as two weeks ago, male members of several families were rounded up. Some were released; some kept in jail. A siege of Halal Mountain began in late August and is still in place. Tanks were sent to the area.

Four Taba suspects died carrying out the bombings, which targeted Israeli tourists. Two surviving suspects who have already been arraigned lived in Arish: Mohammed Gaez, an appliance dealer who is suspected of fashioning timers for the bombs, and Mohammed Rabaa, a metalworker who allegedly fitted the explosives onto vehicles.

Lawyers for Gaez and Rabaa said the two, if they produced anything for the Taba bombers, were unaware of the plot. "Making timers and metal containers was their business. Whatever they did, they did for money," said Ahmad Saif, a lawyer for the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, a human rights organization.

Surviving suspects in the Sharm el-Sheikh attacks are to go to court soon, Omar said. Three others, who died in the attacks, were identified as known fugitives from roundups after the Taba killings. They lived in Rafah, a town that borders the Gaza Strip in north Sinai.

The Interior Ministry says the bombers are influenced by Salafism, a militant, fundamentalist form of Sunni Islam that is related to the Wahhabi Islam dominant in Saudi Arabia. Two dead suspects in the Taba bombings, Soliman Flayfil and his brother, Mohammed Saleh Flayfil, had turned to radical Islam. They were ejected from their Bedouin tribe for criticizing their father's religious observances as loose, Arish residents say. Soliman died in one of the Taba blasts; Mohammed was killed in a shootout with police last month in the Sinai mountains.

After the Taba attack, the government concluded that it was a local plot focused entirely on Israeli tourists -- and the beginning and end of the extremist threat in Sinai. But the Sharm el-Sheikh bombing, and the discovery of Taba suspects among the dead there, destroyed the theory.

"The authorities wanted to wrap up Taba quickly, but they hadn't really uncovered all the details. When the fugitives felt the authorities had relaxed a little, they struck again," said Mohammed Salah, a correspondent for the London-based Al Hayat newspaper and a longtime observer of Islamic groups in Egypt.

Omar, however, insisted that the group behind the bombings had been unable to achieve its goals. "They tried to destabilize Egypt by hitting the interests of the political regime," he said, noting that tourism had not dried up as it had after an attack on tourists at Luxor in 1997. "There wasn't a huge echo this time. They failed."

Correspondent Scott Wilson in Jerusalem contributed to this report.