CAIRO: Egypt's security at the Cairo International Airport is getting tight these days. First, an American citizen was barred from entering the country last week and sent back to London. Now, a Palestinian-Norwegian mother of two was stopped by security as she attempted to board her flight to Amsterdam on Monday morning, being told she was a “national security risk” by security guards. She told Daily News Egypt that the treatment has left her angry and confused. Manal Timraz, 39, had been expecting to board a KLM flight to Amsterdam on her way back home in the UK when Egyptian security guards at the gate stopped her and her two teenage boys after they had passed through passport control at around 1 am Monday morning. “He then told me, ‘I can’t let you travel because there is a message on the system saying you’re a national security case,’†Timraz told Daily News Egypt in a telephone interview. “I asked him what he meant. He said, ‘I’m really sorry, I don’t know what’s going on, all I can do is obey the order.’†Timraz is a humanitarian worker in Gaza and had joined a European relief convoy to the Egyptian-Gazan Rafah border Crossing in May. She is also the brains behind the “One Million Candles for Gaza” campaign after 15 family members, including 11 children, were killed by Israeli air strikes in December last year. After Travis Randall's deportation last week, security sources have been reported telling local Egyptian press that activities involved with Palestinians are red flags. This appears to have been the reason Randall was barred from entering Egypt and Timraz's connections, as a Palestinian and an aid worker, are the likely cause for her short detention. Ironically, Timraz traveled through Egypt to Gaza in May on the convoy and had been allowed to enter Egypt last month without any hiccups. According to reports, she was held at the gate, until airport officials said she could board her flight, 10 minutes after it had departed. The family decided they would not purchase new tickets and wanted to leave the airport, but security officials forced them to go to “new arrivals” in order to reenter the country. “Because our passports had been stamped with exit stamps we had to effectively enter Egypt again, which meant going through arrivals. They made us walk from the departures building to arrivals through the airport grounds where the trucks move the luggage to planes. It was totally unprofessional,†Timraz said in comments carried by Daily News Egypt. “To stop us from flying and then release us after a couple of hours, what kind of national security is that? What was the problem in the first place? If we’re supposedly a national security case why have we been allowed back into Egypt?†As of Tuesday morning, it was unclear what Timraz and her sons' plans were. BM
