Three scenarios for the New Year's Eve terrorist bombing of the St. Mark and St. Peter Church in Alexandria have been put forward by experts. The first scenario implicates al-Qaeda, which could have recruited local elements or sent in people from Afghanistan or other places to carry out the attack. The second scenario suggests that it was a lone individual's haphazard attempt, while the third scenario posits that the perpetrators belong to a local cell that serves as a wing for a regional terrorist organization. The experts agreed that information about the attack is still insufficient to arrive at definite conclusions. “It is obvious that a body was tasked by some organization to carry out this operation,” said military expert Mohamed Abdel Salam. “It was encouraged by the Salafist trend of Alexandria, which has been turned from a liberal city into a place of extremists.” Emad Gad, expert at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, believes al-Qaeda is behind the operation. “There are dormant cells in Egypt, especially in Alexandria, that take orders from abroad,” he said, pointing out that such cells comprise 10 or 12 members at most. Amar Ali Hassan, an expert in fundamentalist movements, pointed at what he called “marginalized” Islamic movements that are activated from time to time. “They will hit in another city if they are not caught,” he said. Translated from the Arabic Edition.
