Egypt searches for answers after police killed in ambush
Conflicting information about the fighting makes it difficult to identify who carried out the attack
Egypt’s president yesterday vowed to press ahead with the country’s war against terrorism after one of the worst attacks against the police in years.
Authorities confirmed only 16 deaths but most reports said more than 50 policemen were killed in the clash between militants and police forces in the Western Desert on Friday.
“Egypt will continue its confrontation against terrorism and those financing and standing behind it, with strength, decisiveness and efficiency, until it’s curbed,” Abdel Fattah El Sisi said.
Egyptian security analysts and diplomats based in Cairo said that conflicting information about the fighting made it difficult to know which armed group carried out the attack.
The clash occurred after security officers received a tip about a terrorist base 135 kilometres from Cairo, leading to a raid that by all accounts went badly for the government’s forces.
“What had happened was not a mere isolated assassination trap, nor an attack on a bank in a border city,” said former prime minister Ahmed Shawfik. “It was a full military action organised unjustly against the most able, capable and honest of our sons.”
Despite an initial claim of responsibility by the Hasam Movement, often tied by authorities to the banned Muslim Brotherhood, security services think the police raid that turned into a terrorist ambush was the work of either Al Qaeda or ISIL.
On Saturday, chief prosecutor Nabil Sadek ordered the state security agency to investigate the shoot-out in Al Wahat as the implications rattle the authorities and the Egyptian public.
“The operation on Friday was to arrest a group linked to Hisham Ashmawy,” said a source in the Egyptian judiciary. “But nothing is clear yet and ISIL and Hasam are also possibilities.”
Hasam translates into “decisiveness” in English, but the name of the group is also an acronym for Harakat Sawa’d Misr – Arms of Egypt Movement.
The attack was close to a geographical operations area often ascribed to Hasam. The group emerged last year claiming the assassination of national security officer Ibrahim Azazi outside his Cairo home in July.
It also took responsibility for a raid in December that killed six police officers at a Giza checkpoint – an operation significantly closer to the capital than Friday’s attack.
But the use of heavy weapons to ambush the police detachment leads investigators towards believing an extremist group other than Hasam carried out the ambush.
Terrorism researchers said the suspected Al Murabitun organisation was established in Derna, Libya, by the former Egyptian army officer Hisham Ashmawy, who in turn was previously active in Ansar Beit Al Maqdis, a militant group mostly active in Sinai.
“In November 2014, Ansar Beit Al Maqdis rebranded itself as ISIL in Sinai Province, but Ashmawy and others disagreed with that decision,” said Issandr El Amrani, North Africa project director at the International Crisis Group.
Ashmawy, a former special services officer, is fully aware of the capabilities of the different branches of Egypt’s armed forces as well as the anti-terror police detachments under interior ministry command.
On Saturday, Ashmawy’s ideological cousins in the Al Qaeda linked Sharia Guardians faction celebrated the attack on their social media channels.
Meanwhile, mainstream journalists in Egypt focused on the professionalism of the attackers – contrasting it with a lack of preparedness of the police unit. “An officer said we are depending on appearance only and the terrorists would flee when they saw our new vehicles,” said an unidentified recruit, whose audio account of the attack was broadcast on Ahmed Moussa’s highly rated Sada El Balad TV programme.
“There was shooting on us from everywhere, I crawled on the ground, took the car and left,” said the survivor.
Now Ahmed Moussa is being investigated by the government-directed media syndicate. “The inaccurate details that aired on Moussa’s show are a violation of basic media regulations that are based on the reliability of a source; especially when concerned with national security,” said Tarek Saadah, the syndicate’s chairman.
Egypt’s state information service has criticised media outlets reporting higher casualty figures for the Al Wahat attack than those released officially by the interior ministry.
Reuters and the BBC put Friday’s toll at 52 dead policemen.
“It is not appropriate that two of the most prominent media outlets in the world make grave professional mistakes by relying on what they called unidentified security sources,” said state information service chairman Diaa Rashwan.
Mainstream journalists in Egypt focused on the professionalism of the attackers – contrasting it with the police unit