MOSQUE MASSACRE
235 dead in Egypt bomb blasts Terrorists lie in wait, shoot rescuers
AT LEAST 235 people were killed when a horde of militants detonated bombs at a mosque in Egypt before unleashing a torrent of bullets at fleeing worshipers.
The coordinated assault in the Sinai Peninsula marked the deadliest terror attack in the nation’s modern history.
Scores of Sufi Muslims were finishing Friday prayers when a bomb ripped through the Al Rawda mosque in Bir al-Abed sometime midday, officials and witnesses said.
Panicked worshipers sprinted outside only to be met by some 40 gunmen lying in wait, some of them in four-wheel-drive vehicles.
“The mosque has two exits, and both were covered by the terrorists, who were parked in cars and started firing at everyone who tried to escape,” a survivor told the Los Angeles Times.
The militants blocked off the scene by blowing up cars in the road.
They also lingered outside the mosque to target first responders, firing several rounds at the first wave of ambulances that eventually arrived, witnesses said.
“They were shooting at people as they left the mosque,” a witness told Reuters. “They were shooting at the ambulances too.”
In addition to the 235 fatalities, more than 109 people were wounded, authorities said.
One witness told The New York Times that he helped collect the bodies of 25 children.
The attack left a trail of corpses scattered around the grounds of the mosque.
The scene inside was just as grim. Photos showed dozens of bodies laid out on the carpeted floor, most of them covered in white sheets stained red with blood.
“It was a horrible scene. There were bodies everywhere,” a witness who identified himself as Mahmoud told the Los Angeles Times.
The militants appeared to have slipped away before police arrived — and there was no immediate claim of responsibility.
News of the attack rocked Egypt, where the government has struggled to quell a simmering Islamist insurgency based in the Sinai Peninsula.
The area is seen as one of the few remaining strongholds of the Islamic State terror group.
Egypt’s military launched air strikes on targets in the mountainous areas around Bir al-Abed in the hours after the assault, according to Reuters.
“The armed forces and the police will avenge our martyrs and restore security and stability with
the utmost force,” Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said in a televised address.
Sisi vowed that his armed forces would respond with “brute force.”
“We cannot be intimidated,” he added. “Our will cannot be broken.”
The assault was startling in its scale and target.
Islamic militants have carried out deadly bombings in churches in Cairo and other Egyptian cities over the past couple of years — killing scores of Coptic Christians.
But the terrorists had largely avoided attacks on mosques.
The victims in Friday’s assault were predominantly Sufi Muslims, who practice a mystical form of Islam seen as heretical by the Islamic State and other Sunni extremist groups.
The ISIS branch in the Sinai Peninsula released a video in March depicting the beheading of two Sufi clerics. The footage also showed members of its religious police rounding up Sufi Muslims and forcing them to sign a document saying they will repent.
Friday’s attack left local residents seething.
“I hope God punishes them for this,” Ibrahim Sheteewi, a resident of Bir al-Abed, told The New York Times.
President Trump denounced what he described as a “horrible and cowardly terrorist attack on innocent and defenseless worshipers.”
A few hours later, he fired off a tweet referencing the assault as a reason to beef up border security in the U.S.
“We have to get TOUGHER AND SMARTER than ever before, and we will,” it read. “Need the WALL, need the BAN! God bless the people of Egypt.”
The area’s emergency responders were so overwhelmed by the number of victims that some of the wounded had to be transported to the hospital in the back of a cattle truck, a medical worker told The New York Times.
Workers at the general hospital in the main northern Sinai town of El Arish struggled to treat the influx of victims suffering gruesome burns, lost limbs and multiple gunshot wounds.
“They pretty much have bullets in every part of their bodies,” one medical official told The Times.
“We are swamped,” he added. “We don’t know what to say. This is insane.”
The casualty count surpassed that of the 2016 downing of a Russian passenger that took off from the Sinai Peninsula resort town of Sharm El Sheikh.
That attack, which was claimed by the Islamic State, killed 226 people.