Egyptian forces swoop on militants
GYPTIAN security forces clashed with gunmen on the outskirts of Cairo yesterday as the army-backed government moved to re-assert control over an Islamist-dominated area where militants staged a bloody attack on a police station last month.
A police general, Nabil Farag, was killed in an exchange of fire during the operation in Kerdasa, a town 14km from Cairo.
Dozens of police and army vehicles entered the town at daybreak. It was the second operation this week to restore control over an area where Islamist sympathies run deep and hostility to the authorities has grown since the army deposed president Mohamed Mursi of the Muslim Brotherhood on July 3.
“The security forces will not retreat until Kerdasa is cleansed of all terrorist and criminal nests,” Interior Ministry spokesman Hany Abdel Latif told state media.
The police were hunting 140 suspects.
There had been little or no sign of state authority in Kerdasa since an attack on its police station on August 14 in which 11 officers were killed.
The building was hit with rocket-propelled grenades and torched after police stormed
Epro-Mursi protest camps in Cairo and killed hundreds of his supporters.
The main suspects in the Kerdasa attack had been detained, state TV reported. Security sources said dozens of weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades, had been seized, and 41 people were arrested.
Militant attacks have been on the rise since the overthrow of the Islamist Mursi, Egypt’s first freely elected president.
The army is mounting an operation in the Sinai Peninsula against al-Qaeda-inspired groups. Shootings have also taken place in the Nile Valley – two members of the armed forces were shot dead in the Nile Delta on Tuesday.
In Cairo yesterday, explosives experts defused two primitive bombs on the metro public transport system.
The authorities say they are in a new war on terror against Islamist militants. State media have labelled the Muslim Brotherhood, the group that propelled Mursi to power last year, as an enemy of the state.
Heavy gunfire was heard in a village near Kerdasa as police chased a group of men into side streets, TV footage showed. Gunfire appeared to hit near a police position.
Security forces in body armour and armed with automatic rifles fanned out in Kerdasa. Two policemen were wounded by a hand grenade thrown from a rooftop, security sources said.
Army checkpoints secured the entrances to the town. Tyres set ablaze to obstruct the operation smouldered in the roads. Around a dozen residents dragged a man towards an army checkpoint, yelling: “We caught one.” After handing him over to soldiers, they chanted “the army and the people are one hand”.
In a similar operation earlier this week, the security forces moved into the town of Delga in the southern province of Minya, another area known for Islamist sympathies.
Egypt has been in a state of emergency since August 14 and large parts of the country remain under a night-time curfew. The government decided yesterday to shorten the hours of the curfew to start at midnight instead of 11pm from Saturday. – Reuters