Cairo – Egyptian authorities swept through villages on the outskirts of Cairo on Sunday, detaining more than 200 people after attacks Saturday left seven people wounded and three attackers dead.
The police said most of the detainees, from the neighboring villages of Ammar and Ezbet al-Gabalawi north of Cairo, were being investigated for connections to local terrorist networks.
Government officials said the three dead attackers – Ehab Yousri Yassin; his sister, Negat Yassin; and his fiancée, Iman Ibrahim Khamis – were from the area, The Associated Press reported.
Authorities said Ehab Yassin, who was a suspect in a deadly bombing April 7 at Cairo’s main bazaar, had been spotted by security officers and chased into a central tourist area Saturday afternoon.
He then leapt from a bridge behind the popular Egyptian Museum and blew himself up, wounding three Egyptians, an Israeli couple, a Swedish man and an Italian woman.
Less than two hours later, two veiled women, whom security officials later identified as Negat Yassin and Khamis, attacked a bus packed with Israeli tourists near Cairo’s Citadel, firing several shots at the bus but not hitting anyone.
Yassin then shot and killed Khamis and then herself, the authorities said, ending what was believed to be the first instance of a terrorist attack by a woman in Egypt.
On Sunday, Egyptian officials sought to allay fears that the violence was part of a new wave of terrorism aimed at the country’s tourism industry.
In the mid-1990s, a wave of attacks against tourists by militant Islamic groups resulted in a harsh crackdown throughout the country. In the worst incident, in 1997, militants opened fire on tourists in Luxor, killing 58 foreigners and four Egyptians.
Unlike those attacks, officials said, the latest incidents were committed by a small militant cell of only eight people, seven of whom have either been captured or are dead.
The police said that two suspects in the April 7 bombing, Asharaf Saeed Youssif and Gamal Ahmed Abdul Aal, were detained Saturday, and that officers were closing in on Ehab Yassin before he fled and detonated his bomb.
Officials said the deaths of Yassin and Khamis left only one other suspect in the April 7 bombing: Yassin’s brother, Muhammad, who was still at large.
Some analysts say the incident reflects a growing trend away from attacks by large and politically oriented groups.
“Before, we had political organizations that had a military arm. Now we seem to have groups of just martyrs” without a clear agenda, said Abdel Monem Said, director of the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
While the attacks threaten Egypt’s tourist season, they also may have a notable effect on the opposition’s campaign to lift the country’s state-of-emergency laws, Said said.
“There has been pressure to lift emergency laws, which were meant to fight terrorism, but now there is terrorism again,” he said. “Some people are saying we should wait before we lift them; others are arguing that the emergency laws have not stopped the terrorism at all.”
In recent months, growing protests by Egypt’s opposition movement have called for the lifting of the emergency laws, which have been in place since the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981.