Egypt foils suicide attack on foreign embassy
CAIRO (Reuters) — Egyptian security forces have thwarted a plan by an alQaeda-linked cell to carry out a suicide attack on a foreign embassy, capturing three militants, the interior minister said on Saturday.
Mohamed Ibrahim said the men, who he accused of having links to militants in the Middle East and Pakistan, were found in possession of 10 kg (22 lb) of aluminum nitrate, which is used to make bombs.
He declined to say which embassy had been targeted.
“The Interior Ministry was able to direct a qualitative blow to a terrorist cell that was planning suicide operations against vital, important and foreign facilities in the country,” he said in a televised news conference.
Egypt has long been an incubator for Islamist militancy. Al-Qaeda’s leader, Ayman alZawahiri, is Egyptian.
Security has deteriorated since a 2011 uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak, whose 30 years in power were marked by militant violence including an armed Islamist insurrection.
Armed Islamist groups expanded in the Sinai Peninsula after the revolt, but militancy has been less apparent in the Nile Delta, where majority of the population is concentrated.
Two of the suspects were from Alexandria on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, the state news agency reported. It did not say where the third was from.
It was the second time since President Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood politician, came to power that the authorities have said they had uncovered a militant Islamist group in the Nile Valley.
Twenty-six alleged Islamist militants including two former military officers went on trial last month for planning attacks against the state. Ibrahim said that group — known as the Nasr City cell — was connected to the militants whose arrest was announced on Saturday.