Egyptian authorities have arrested a group of 49 people accused of plotting attacks on it’s soil. The suspects are alleged to be part of the Lebanese Shiite resistance movement Hizballah. The group’s alleged leader, Sami Shihab, was confirmed as a being a Hizballah operative by Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in a speech last friday.
“Brother Sami is a member of Hizbullah, and what he was doing on the Egyptian-Palestinian borders was a logistic mission to transport arms and equipment to the Palestinian lands; all other accusations are false and full of imagination and bluffs,” he said.
“If helping the Palestinians whose land is seized and who are being killed and besieged is an accusation, then I thereby declare that I am guilty of this accusation,” he added.
The Egyptian government is weary of Islamist groups operating within its borders. In 1981, President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Muslim extremists. His successor, Hosni Mubarak, has been president ever since.
Relations between Hizballah and Egypt have been strained, especially since Israel’s latest offensive in Gaza, when Egypt kept its border with Gaza closed and refused to help Hamas:
“Israel has long accused Hezbollah and Iran of building up Hamas’s firepower and of shipping explosives and rockets into the Gaza Strip through a network of tunnels across the Egyptian border. Israeli officials also complained before the January fighting that Cairo wasn’t doing enough to thwart this trafficking.”
