26 Die as Egypt Cracks Down on Extremists

CAIRO — Egyptian authorities, faced with a growing wave of Islamic fundamentalist violence, unleashed a major new crackdown against suspected extremists Wednesday that left 26 people dead and at least 40 others wounded.

The death toll, which resulted from a series of bloody shootouts at extremist hide-outs in and around Cairo and at a fundamentalist mosque in the southern city of Aswan, was the highest in a single day since the abortive Islamic uprising that followed the assassination of former President Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Among the dead were four police officers, killed as they sought to arrest Islamic militants suspected in a series of recent attacks on police and on Christian jewelry shop owners throughout Egypt.

Also killed were the wife and baby of one of the suspects, Khalifa Mahmoud Ramadan, who was sought in connection with the assassination of a police officer last year in the city of Fayoum, an oasis west of Cairo. Ramadan was killed and the Interior Ministry said his family was shot “because the extremists used them as a shield in trying to escape.”

The violent clashes came less than two weeks after a bomb destroyed a crowded coffee shop in downtown Cairo, killing three.

The homemade explosive, packed with nails, blew up on the same day that the World Trade Center was bombed in New York. Mohammed A. Salameh, who attends a Jersey City mosque led by Egyptian fundamentalist cleric Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, has been accused of “aiding and abetting” the New York bombing, which killed five people and injured more than 1,000.

The blind sheik’s underground organization, the Gamaa al Islamiya (Islamic Group), has denied responsibility for both bombings, though Abdul Rahman has repeatedly criticized foreign tourists for bringing immoral behavior into Egypt and spreading AIDS.

Gamaa al Islamiya, which has publicly declared war on foreign tourism, stepped up the campaign last week by announcing that foreign residents and investors would also become targets of Islamic militants’ “legitimate retribution.”

With fundamentalist violence rising throughout Egypt, authorities have swept Islamic hotbeds throughout the country since late last year, arresting more than 2,000 suspects, and opened a major new military trial against 43 Muslim activists suspected in a wave of violent attacks against foreign tourists in Egypt.

The defendants have proclaimed Abdul Rahman their leader, and at the opening day of their trial in Cairo on Tuesday one of them, Hisham Abdel Zaher, an engineer, read a statement asserting that their movement was responsible for Sadat’s assassination and, more recently, that of a noted secularist author opposed to the Islamist movement in Egypt.

The Islamists are seeking to overthrow the regime of President Hosni Mubarak and replace it with an Islamic state faithful to the principles of Islamic law. Similar movements are working against Arab governments throughout the Middle East.

“If terrorism and extremism means legitimate self-defense and the defense of our religion and honor, we welcome terrorism,” Abdel Zaher declared, as other defendants chanted slogans such as “Islam is coming” and “Oh Jews, Mohammed’s army is coming back.”

The latest violence began Tuesday night in Aswan, one of Egypt’s main tourist destinations, after the sunset meal that breaks the traditional Muslim daylong fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

The Interior Ministry said police surrounded the fundamentalist Al Rahman Mosque after receiving a tip that Islamic activists planned to gather there for a meeting and then move into the streets for an anti-government demonstration.

Tensions had escalated in the southern Nile city since last week, when suspected Islamic militants shot and killed two police officers and the 8-year-old son of one of the officers.

A gunfight of several hours followed the surrounding of the mosque, during which 14 suspected extremists and one officer were killed and 35 other suspects injured.

Police said they recovered an automatic rifle, four handguns, four knives, three explosive charges and 20 rounds of ammunition from the mosque after the shootout. They said they arrested 78 people.

Neighborhood residents told reporters that police stormed the mosque and began firing at about 200 unarmed worshipers as they prayed.

“They hit them while they were praying. They were unarmed. They had no arms so they could not return the fire. The attack was carried out by one side. We could see it. It was a massacre,” one resident told the British news agency Reuters.

The other shootouts occurred in Cairo and Qaliubiya, when gunfire erupted as police attempted to make arrests at suspected extremist hide-outs.

Four suspects died in Qaliubiya. Two police officers and two suspects were killed in a raid in the Giza district, after which police found two automatic rifles, a homemade bomb and packets of TNT explosives.

A fourth officer and two more suspects were killed in the slum of Imbaba when police launched a raid against extremists suspected in a series of attacks on Christian-owned jewelry shops.