Pakistanis Hunted in Egypt Terror Attacks (First London and now Egypt)

SHARM EL-SHEIK, Egypt - Police investigators said Monday that they were searching for six Pakistani men as the probe into the weekend's terrorist attack at this Red Sea resort widened.

Police were circulating photographs of the six, who have apparently been missing since before the attacks, at checkpoints in and around this southern Sinai resort city. An Associated Press correspondent who saw the images said the men appeared to be between the ages of 20 and 30.

The involvement of Pakistanis in the attack in Sharm el-Sheik would be unprecedented, as non-Egyptians have rarely been linked to attacks here. It would also be extremely difficult for a group of young Pakistanis not to be noticed in Sharm, one of the heaviest policed cities in Egypt and a favorite place of residence for President Hosni Mubarak.

An official at the Pakistan Embassy in Cairo said his embassy was in contact with Egyptian authorities over the issue of the missing Pakistanis.

"But they have not officially informed us that the Pakistanis are suspected of involvement in the bombing. They are only saying: 'We are searching for them. We cannot trace them,"' said Khalid Ahmed, a counselor at the Pakistani mission.

"It is very difficult for us to confirm whether any Pakistani was in Sharm el-Sheik but it is possible that someone may have been there. I have a strong belief that Pakistanis cannot be involved in terrorism here," he said.

Many Pakistanis use Egypt as a route to travel to Europe to find jobs, he said. Last week, police arrested between 40 and 45 Pakistanis in the Mediterranean city of Alexandria for being illegal immigrants.

Police have detained more than 70 people in Sharm and other parts of the Sinai Peninsula during the investigation, which is also following different threads, including possible Palestinian involvement and whether the attacks were linked to last October's bombings in two other Sinai resorts.

The investigators, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the inquiry, said they are looking into whether the six men had any involvement in carrying out Saturday's attack, Egypt's deadliest ever.

Police were to conduct DNA testing on the remains of a suicide bomber found in a car that rammed into the Ghazala Gardens Hotel in Naama Bay, the city's main tourist area, early Saturday. Two other blasts rocked a car park near the hotel and an area about two miles away called the Old Market.

According to local hospitals, Saturday's pre-dawn bombings killed at least 88 people; Egypt's Health Ministry put the death toll at 64. Hospitals said the ministry count does not include a number of sets of body parts. At least one American was killed.

If independently confirmed, any involvement of Pakistanis would suggest that those behind Saturday's bombings belong to a much wider terror network than previously thought.

Until the latest news broke Monday, suspicions had primarily focused on a Sinai-based network thought responsible for bombings in the area last October that also targeted tourist sites.

The involvement of the Pakistanis, if proven, would also increase suspicions that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida may have been involved in the attacks. The Saudi-born bin Laden is popular among militant Pakistani groups and is known to enjoy support in tribal areas close to the Afghan border.

On Sunday, security officials said the bombers appeared to have entered Sharm in two pickup trucks loaded with explosives hidden under vegetables and that police were searching for three suspects believed to have survived the bombings. It was unclear if police were linking those three in any way to the six Pakistanis being sought.

Before the attacks, the militants rubbed serial numbers off the trucks' engines, the officials said. Such serial numbers had been a key clue Egyptian investigators had used to track down those behind similar vehicle bombings last October against two resorts further north in the Sinai Peninsula, Taba and Ras Shitan.

Investigators were also examining whether the suicide bomber who set off the blast at the Ghazala was one of five suspects still at large from the October attacks that killed 34 people.

Police took DNA samples from the parents of the five Taba suspects to compare with bodies found at the Ghazala, a police official said in el-Arish, where the parents were briefly detained.

Egyptian authorities portrayed the Taba bombings as an extension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rather than a homegrown Islamic militant movement or an al-Qaida-linked operation. They said a Palestinian who died in the attacks had recruited Bedouins and Egyptians to plot the bombings.

But the sophistication of the Sharm bombings — and their timing on the heels of two rounds of explosions in London — raised worries of a wider international connection and possible al-Qaida links.

Two rival claims of responsibility have emerged for the Sharm bombings, but neither statement could be authenticated. One was by the Abdullah Azzam Brigades of al-Qaida in Syria and Egypt, which also claimed responsibility for the October bombings. The other was by the previously unknown Holy Warriors of Egypt.

Associated Press writers Sadaqat Jan in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Maamoun Youssef and Hamza Hendawi in Cairo, Egypt, contributed to this report.

Egypt hunts Pakistani resort bombing suspects Lamia Radi AFP July 25, 2005

PROTESTORS: Egyptians working in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh attend a protest in the resort on July 24. More than 1,000 Egyptian hotel workers, bedouin sheikhs and foreign dive school instructors marched through the city on Sunday to condemn bombs that killed 88 in the Red Sea resort. (REUTERS) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sharm El Sheikh, EGYPT -- Egypt was hunting on Monday for six Pakistani nationals suspected of involvement in the devastating multiple bombings in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh, police said.

Pictures of the suspects who are believed to have entered Egypt in early July were distributed to police stations in the Sharm El Sheikh area, police in Cairo said.

Their passports were found in an unspecified Sharm El Sheikh hotel, police said, adding that one of them might have died in the deadly bombings but stressing that the Pakistanis were not necessarily the bombers.

According to hospital officials the multiple bombings - Egypt's deadliest ever terrorist attacks - killed 88 people but the health and tourism ministries have reported only up to 64 confirmed dead.

The resort was packed with tourists when the pre-dawn bombs went off and foreign embassy officials were still in Sharm El Sheikh on Monday, as more than 30 bodies were still to be identified and foreigners continued to scramble for flights home.

At least 95 people have been arrested in a police dragnet as part of a massive search for the perpetrators of the triple attack on a hotel, a market and a parking lot that came on the heels of deadly bombings in London.

Pakistan has come under increased international pressure to crack down on Islamic militants after it emerged that some of the bombers in the July 7 attacks in London, British Muslims of Pakistani descent, had recently visited the country.

Police said that some 600 kilograms (1,300 pounds) of explosive were used in the attacks, with more than half in the suicide car bomb that rammed into the luxury Ghazala Gardens hotel.

The first explosion - also a suicide car bomb - occurred at 1:15 am (2215 GMT Friday) at the market but was actually destined for a hotel located 200 meters (yards) away, the sources said, adding that police had stopped the car for inspection, after which the explosive charge was detonated.

They said that it was not clear whether the bomber had died.

The second explosion at Ghazala Gardens occurred minutes later, followed by a third when a bomb placed inside a bag went off, police said. The suicide bomber died in the Ghazala blast.

Saturday's pre-dawn attacks in Sharm, which analysts said were an attempt to destabilize Egypt in the run-up to the first-ever competitive presidential elections just weeks away, were first claimed by an Al Qaeda-linked group.

Another group calling itself Mujahideen Egypt also claimed the attacks on an Islamic Website and gave the names of five "martyrs" who allegedly died in carrying out the bombings.

According to various reports the foreign victims included four Turkish nationals, an Italian couple, two Britons as well as holidaymakers from the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Russia, Ukraine and an Israeli Arab.

Interior minister Habib Al Adli claimed that investigators already had leads and suggested that the attacks could be connected to deadly anti-Israeli bombings on October 7 in Taba and Nuweiba further north on the Sinai coast.

"This cowardly and criminal act, which is aimed at destabilizing Egypt will reinforce our determination to press the battle against terror through to its eradication," President Hosni Mubarak said on Saturday.

Cairo faced harsh criticism from Israel for its failure to crack down on militants following the October bombings.

Jordan boosted security in its own tourist areas following the bombings, which dealt a blow to Egypt's crucial tourism industry by striking its flagship resort at the peak of the holiday season.

As shell-shocked holidaymakers arrived back in their home countries, some of them with light wounds and scratches, some 700 Sharm El Sheikh residents and foreigners working in the resort city held a peace demonstration, chanting "We are against terrorism", "United we will win".

A new scare on Sunday hit the capital Cairo, scene of deadly attacks against tourists in the 1990s, where police initially said that a man was critically wounded by the accidental explosion of his own bomb.

However, the interior ministry later denied that there had been a bomb and explained that the 33-year-old man was a "collector of vintage items" and was wounded by the explosion of one of his objects.

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