CAIRO: Police investigators in Luxor are at a loss to explain how three houses suddenly caught on fire and burned to the ground. Forensic scientists have intensified efforts to unravel the mystery surrounding a number of night fires that started last week in a cluster of small houses in the village of Al Zeinya Qibli local press have been reporting recently. And the stories are sowing the imaginations and usual conspiracy theories of Egyptians. The fact that most of these houses are generally not equipped with electrical power due to their remoteness from any metropolitan center helps investigators rule out the possibility of an electric short circuit or overload as the cause of the fires. When investigators showed up at one domicile that had been damaged by the flames, villagers said another house down the road mysteriously caught fire. That has left the villagers with the belief that the fires are the workings of jinn, especially when no evidence of sabotage or foul play could be determined. CID (Criminal Investigation Department) investigators who examined the houses stressed that there was no obvious reason as to why such fires would happen. As a result, the villagers of Al Zeinya Qibli are now resorting to exorcism by local sheikhs to read Quranic verses and 'chase' the jinn away. And this is not the first time it happens. A few years ago the residents of a village in Suhag, a major Upper Egypt province, were shocked to see fires raging on the roofs of their houses, which are usually used to store woods for country ovens or serve as a place for their pigeons' nesting towers. In this case too, the cause of the fire had remained a riddle that was never resolved, but the only clue to the fires was an eyewitness who had spotted with the naked eye the tail of what he believed to be a meteor which he said darted its way through the sky and landed on one of the roofs. Could meteors then be the 'jinn' everyone fears? A discovery in 2004 of the world's largest crater field in one corner of the Western Desert is likely to shed light on the occurrence of such phenomena that the villagers tend to associate with the supernatural. The field that shelters more than 1, 300 craters, is located some 300 km southwest of the Al Dakhala oasis on an area estimated at 4,500 sq km and could be a focus of NASA research into life on the Moon and Mars. The craters range in size and are often as large as a football stadium. In October 2006, the Discovery Channel featured a program which said that scientists are still baffled by the craters and are unable to determine with conclusive evidence whether the craters were caused by a sustained meteor shower or volcanic disturbances. According to the show, geologists from France, Germany, South Africa, Egypt and the United States visited more than 60 of the craters in 2004. But discovery of mineral deposits, particularly yellow-green silica glass fragments, in the Western Desert may indicate that the meteor shower theory is the more likely. Ancient lore may also point the way. In 525 BCE, several thousand soldiers belonging to Persian Emperor Kambiz, who had invaded and occupied Egypt, mysteriously disappeared as they marched through the Western Desert hoping to reach Matrouh to destroy the temple of Amon. Could they have perished as a result of a meteor shower, and if so, are these showers now targeting the same area? Luxor is adjacent to the Western Desert but many questions persist, specifically, why have meteor showers not been reported in other places in Egypt or the region? The CID labs are currently examining evidence collected from the houses.
