The Sinai attacks, launched shortly after the discovery of new terrorist cells, have reinforced the already strong belief that emergency rule will be extended, reports Jailan Halawi Monday evening's bomb attacks in the Sinai resort of Dahab was not the only recent incident involving terrorism. On 19 April the Ministry of Interior announced it was holding 22 Islamist militants suspected of planning attacks against tourists, a gas pipeline on the Greater Cairo ring road and Muslim and Christian religious leaders. The ministry identified the group as Al-Taefa Al-Mansoura -- the Victorious Sect -- and said its members came mostly from the shanty-towns of Torah and Al-Zawya Al-Hamra, northeast and south of Cairo. The group, which the ministry says is led by Ahmed Gabr, alias Abu Musab, a 26- year-old Faculty of Art student, and Ahmed Bassiouni, alias Abu Bakr El-Masri, also 26, espouses Salafi takfir i, a Jihadist ideology that identifies anyone with whom they disagree as infidels and therefore potential targets. As well as identifying religious leaders as potential victims the group, said the ministry, had also been seeking to target young people whose lifestyles they disapproved of. Taefa Al-Mansoura, the ministry said in its statement, had depended on the Internet to download information on how to manufacture bombs and poisons, and in arranging meetings among its members. The group is also alleged to have attempted to buy land in Al-Saff, south of Cairo, to be used as a training camp for members before they departed to fight in trouble spots such as Chechnya and Afghanistan. Families of the detained have dismissed the accusations as baseless and question why, after detaining the men for 50 -- in some cases 90 -- days the government had suddenly decided to break the news. "It seems they are looking for a pretext to extend the State of Emergency, and they are using our children to do this," said one family member. "These young men may have been religious but they were never violent and had always been very polite," said a neighbour. The arrests were made public less than a week after sectarian riots in Alexandria following attacks on three churches that left two men -- a Copt and a Muslim -- dead. The announcement of the detentions comes less than a month before Emergency Laws, enforced in 1981 following the assassination of President Anwar El-Sadat, are due for review. A day before the arrests were made public President Hosni Mubarak hinted that the Emergency Laws would be renewed when they expire in May since, in the absence of anti-terror legislation their abrogation would create a "dangerous vacuum". The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) was joined by the Muslim Brotherhood, the leading opposition group in parliament, in saying that any extension to Emergency Laws would underline the government's reluctance to allow any exercise of political freedom. Leading Brotherhood figure Essam El-Erian said the reported arrests exaggerated the activities of a group that was obviously small in number and poorly financed. In an interview with Qatari-based satellite channel Al-Jazeera, El-Erian said the government was "seeking a pretext to extend the state of emergency, which is now rejected by 114 members of parliament". In a separate development, on 23 April police arrested five men in Qalyubiya Governorate on charges of distributing leaflets in schools and government establishments calling for the overthrow of the regime and its replacement with an Islamic state. The prosecutor ordered the five men to be remanded in custody for 15 days pending investigations. The state security prosecutor is expected to start interrogating members of Taefa Al-Mansoura -- all of whom are males and between 18 and 31 years old -- within the next few days.
