Egypt's Ministry of Interior said in a statement on Thursday said that security forces arrested Mohamed Abdullah Mosmary, a Libyan national who was involved in the Wahat shootout in October, where 16 Egyptian police officers were killed during a raid on a terrorist camp in the Western Desert. The ministry said that Mosmary, a resident of Libya's Derna born in 1992, is the member of a cell formed in Derna by leading terrorist figure Emad El-Din Mahmoud Abdel-Hamid, who was killed in an airstrike by Egyptian forces on terrorist hideouts in the Western desert. The members of the cell received training in Libya before sneaking into Egypt to a training camp in El-Wahat, recruiting 29 new members from Giza and Qalioubiya, the statement said. Investigations also revealed that members of the cell were involved in the May attack on buses carrying Coptic Christians in Upper Egypt's Minya governorate, which killed 28 people. Eleven police officers, four conscripts and one sergeant were killed in the 20 October shootout while raiding a terrorist training camp in the Bahariya Oasis, about 135 kilometres (83 miles) southwest of Cairo. The Ministry of Interior said that 15 terrorists were killed during the shootout. Following the shootout, Egyptian military and police forces launched a number of joint operations targeting terrorist hideouts in the Western Desert area, killing a number of terrorists involved in the shootout. A little known group affiliated with Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the Wahat incident in a statement online, stating that its leader Abdel-Hamid was killed by Egyptian air forces. The terrorist group Daesh had claimed responsibility for the Minya attack in May.
