“Mahmoud Shafik Mohamed Mustafa, 22, blew himself up using an explosive belt after entering the church,” President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi said during Monday's state funeral for the 24 people – mostly women - killed during Sunday Mass in Al-Botrusiya Church in the grounds of the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Abbasiya. "Condolences to all the Egyptian people. I will not say to our Christian brothers only but our condolences to all Egyptians," Al-Sisi said. "This attack caused great sorrow but it will not break us…We will stand firm and God willing we will win this war.” Al-Sisi added that four others – three men and a woman – had been arrested in connection with the blast and police were searching for two more suspects. The bombing was the deadliest attack on the Christian community, which makes up 10 per cent of Egypt's population, since a 2011 bombing killed 23 worshippers outside Two Saints Church in Alexandria. On Tuesday afternoon the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the terror attack on the Cathedral. Within hours of the funeral the Interior Ministry had issued a statement naming the four detainees Al-Sisi said had been arrested and providing further details of the bombing. “Two explosive belts ready to be detonated and other materials used to make explosive devices were found at a hideout used by Mustafa. Mustafa had been arrested in March 2014 while securing a Muslim Brotherhood protest while armed and was released pending investigation two months later,” reads the statement. “Rami Mohamed Abdel-Hameed Abdel-Ghani is suspected to have provided refuge for Mustafa, preparing him, and hiding the explosives. The three others detainees are Mohamed Hamdi Abdel-Hamid Abdel-Ghani, Mohsen Mustafa Al-Sayed Qassem and Ola Hussein Mohamed Ali,” said the Interior Ministry. According to the statement the four detainees will be presented to state security prosecution. The cell was led by Mohab Mustafa Al-Sayed Qassem, who moved to Qatar in 2015 where he met with Muslim Brotherhood leaders. “Qassem was offered financial and logistical support to carry out attacks in Egypt and following his return travelled to North Sinai where Islamist insurgents trained him in using weapons and making explosive devices. After his return to Cairo, Qassem was instructed by Brotherhood members residing in Qatar to start planning attacks targeting Copts.” The clear picture painted by the Interior Ministry's statement was quickly muddied by Yasmin Hossam Al-Din, the lawyer who represented Mustafa in 2014. On Monday she posted on her Facebook account that though Mustafa “had been tortured in custody and was accused of participating in an unlicensed demonstration, possession of a machine gun and a crude bomb, and being a member of an outlawed group” he was released two months later. She added that the prosecution then “dropped all the charges except participating in the protest and he received a two year jail sentence in absentia”. His family members said in various televised interviews that he is fugitive and they haven't seen Mustafa since the issuance of two-year jail term in 2015. The Interior Ministry says the bombing was an attempt to stir up large-scale sectarian conflict, citing as evidence a statement issued on 5 December by a shadowy group named The Egyptian Revolutionary Council, allegedly an arm of the Brotherhood, vowing to “target the Orthodox Church because of its support for the state". The Muslim Brotherhood has denied any involvement with Sunday's explosion. The cathedral bombing has sparked angry protests by Copts. On Monday they protested in front of St Mary and St Athanasius Coptic Orthodox church in Nasr City. A day earlier demonstrators at the Coptic Orthodox Cathedral had raised chants against the Ministry of Interior. Apparently, part of their anger was attributed to the recent death of Magdi Makeen, a 50-year-old Coptic fish vendor who was allegedly tortured to death inside Al-Amiriya Police Station shortly after being arrested on 13 November. The autopsy report issued by the Forensic Authority stipulated that torture was behind Makeen's death. It said someone had stood on Makeen's back, causing him to panic. He suffered a blood clot in the lungs, which killed him. On Monday protests, the demonstrators accused the security forces of incompetence and demanding the dismissal of the minister. During his funeral speech Al-Sisi had said “Do not say this was a security flaw. What happened was an act of desperation in the face of the great progress the security forces have made in fighting terrorism." On the same day as the funeral Al-Sisi met with Prime Minister Sherif Ismail, Defence Minister Sedki Sobhi, Interior Minister Magdi Abdel- Ghaffar and the heads of Military Intelligence and National Security to review security conditions across Egypt. Security expert and former deputy head of State Security Fouad Allam insists the bombing was not a result of security failings. “This failure is only in the minds of journalists. Terrorist attacks occur in most developed countries and security forces worldwide are lucky to prevent at most 80 per cent of such attacks,” Allam told the Al-Ahram Weekly. Security expert, Major General Hossam Sweilam, also agreed on distancing the security performance from Sunday's attack. “The responsibility of securing the church's gates lies with a private security firm while the external security is for the police,” Sweilam told the Weekly. Hence, he says, anyone that enters from the gates of the church is under the responsibility of the private security firm, not the police. The cathedral bombing came two days after six policemen were killed and three injured when a security checkpoint in the Al-Haram district of Giza was attacked. The Weekly has learnt from security sources that the entire Interior Ministry will be placed on high alert. The minister has ordered all holiday leave of officers cancelled. This would include Coptic Christmas, New Year's celebrations and the sixth anniversary of the 25 January Revolution, all national holidays. If security experts and the president are of one mind – that this was not a failure of policing - some political parties shared the angry protesters' view that security was incomprehensively lax. Al-Karama party and the Socialist Popular Alliance party (SPAP) issued a joint statement Sunday accusing security forces of negligence when it comes to combating terrorism. “The Ministry of Interior gives more importance to political than criminal security,” the parties said. They demanded that the officials responsible for securing the church be held to account and added that “tyranny and terrorism are two sides of the same coin”. “Information, readiness of forces and pre-emptive strikes are three ways to fight terrorism while a fourth, not yet realised, is deterrence through speedy trials,” Sweilam said. Sweilam was indirectly referring to part of Al-Sisi's speech on Monday in which he urged parliament to amend the laws "which shackle the judicial system”, slow down the trials of terrorists and hinder judges from issuing deterrent and speedy verdicts. Al-Sisi's statements were reminiscent of what he said two years ago during the funeral of former prosecutor general Hisham Barakat who died in a car bombing near his home in Cairo. At that time Al-Sisi pledged laws that would “implement justice in the fastest possible time”. Six weeks later, on August 2015, Al-Sisi issued the Counterterrorism Law that defines a terrorist act as "any use of force, violence, threat or terrorising”. On Monday 100 Egyptian MPs proposed that the Criminal Procedures Law, issued in 1950, and a 2014 presidential decree outlining counterterrorism measures, be changed to allow all terrorism-related crimes to be referred to military courts. MP Essam Farouk told the Weekly that the proposed amendments would ensure that justice for terrorists is speeded up. “The House of Representatives will sit in permanent session until legislative amendments that allow for swift trials are passed, even if this requires changes to the constitution” said Essam. Since the ouster of Mohamed Morsi in 2013 Egypt has been fighting an Islamist insurgency led by the Islamic State's branch in North Sinai, formerly known as Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis. Hundreds of soldiers and police — mainly in North Sinai — have been killed. Though Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis is at the forefront of militant groups launching attacks against security targets smaller militant groups — most notably Hasm (Decisiveness) and Lewaa Al-Thawra (Revolution Brigade) — emerged during 2016, carrying out terrorist attacks in Cairo and provincial governorates. Sweilam says terrorism will continue "unless we achieve cultural and intellectual awareness, and religious enlightenment. In the wake of Sunday's attack, the Egyptian Writers Union issued a statement characterising terrorism as “one result of the failure of cultural institutions to raise awareness”. It is a view with which Allam concurs, as least in part. “To rely solely on security solutions to the challenge posed by terrorism has resulted in catastrophic failures. It has involved the arrest of innocent people who are then radicalised in jail. When they are released from prison they pose as great a danger to society as any confirmed extremist,” Allam told the Weekly. Socio-political researcher Ammar Ali Hassan argues that the wave of terrorism Egypt is currently experiencing “began during the Morsi presidency, with the killing of soldiers in Sinai, the blockades of the Supreme Constitutional Court and Media Production City and the burning of the Wafd Party headquarters and the entrance to Al-Watan's newspaper premises”. “It continued after the end of Muslim Brotherhood rule in a succession of terrorist attacks that is ongoing,” Hassan said in an analysis published previously in the Weekly. Egypt, he says, is now threatened by three concentric terrorist belts. The first surrounds the whole country and comprises jihadist takfiri groups in eastern Libya, a government close to the Muslim Brotherhood in Khartoum and Hamas rule in Gaza. A second belt “surrounds Cairo and consists of a growing number of Salafi, jihadist and Muslim Brotherhood members in the adjacent governorates governorates of Fayyum, Qaliubiya, Sharqiya and rural Giza”. “The third belt includes the informal settlements that surround the areas inhabited by the middle and upper middle classes. They grew as a result of poverty and the government's withdrawal from providing housing and have resulted in a ruralisation of the city.” “Dismantling this belt requires a comprehensive plan and will take time to implement. The role of education, economic development, culture and the institutions that produce religious rhetoric all need to be addressed.” Hassan believes “the current wave will eventually recede and yield another ideological revision” if only because “crime does not pay and terrorism does not create a state”. “This,” he says, “particularly applies to a country whose people have shown themselves impervious to intimidation, refusing to allow the fear tactics used by the Muslim Brotherhood to dissuade them from taking to the streets in the millions to bring down Muslim Brotherhood rule.” "If there is a failure in combatting terrorism, it is from the state, not security. Scientific solutions to confront terrorism should rely on seven factors: political, cultural, economic, information, social, religious and security. Ministries, state institutions and Al-Azhar should be included since it is only through these seven elements that the state can get rid of the false beliefs of terrorists and make people understand the correct teachings of the religion,” Allam, a security official who helped quash a wave of terrorist attacks in Egypt in the 1990s, said.
