To
the shock of U.S. officials, authorities in Egypt have arrested the local
employee and charged him as the purported commander of a radical Islamist
organization.
Egyptian authorities have arrested
an Egyptian security guard at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo,
claiming he is a senior figure in an Islamist terrorist organization. U.S.
officials are scrambling to get information from Egyptian authorities, who did
not alert them beforehand.
An embassy official confirmed to The Daily Beast that
42-year-old Ahmed Ali, accused by the Egyptians of helping to plan or taking
part in more than a dozen attacks on security forces, was an employee in the
security service at the mission in downtown Cairo. Egyptian authorities are
claiming he is a commander in the militant Helwan Brigades.
Both the lack of any forewarning by the Egyptian authorities
and the apparent security failure by the U.S. State Department, which failed to
unearth Ali’s membership in the brigades, is likely to prompt outrage on
Capitol Hill.
Security for all of the U.S. embassies in the Middle East is
meant to have been tightened since the 2012 militant assault on the U.S.
diplomatic outpost inBenghazi in
eastern Libya that led to the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
The disclosure of the arrest by Egyptian authorities on
Wednesday came just hours before a suicide bomber blew himself up outside Luxor’s
ancient Karnak temple in southern Egypt in an attack that left four people,
including two police officers, wounded. Police said they also killed two of the
bomber’s accomplices.
No group has as yet claimed responsibility for the attack at
the spectacular temple, with its dozens of sphinxes and beautiful bas reliefs
of ancient gods, which is part of a UNESCO World
Heritage site on the Nile River. But some analysts speculated
that the attack may have been organized by the so-called Islamic State, which
has been courting local jihadis, seeking to persuade them to affiliate with the
terror group based in Syria and Iraq.
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