Ships in the Suez Canal and oil pipelines were the targets of a terrorist plot involving al- Qaeda, Egyptian authorities said after arresting 26 suspects. The 25 Egyptians and one Palestinian were detained with one pistol, electronic circuits and devices available in shops, the Interior Ministry said in a statement on its Web site yesterday.
The Egyptian accused of leading the cell, Mohamed Fahim Hussein, confessed to communicating with groups linked to al- Qaeda, the ministry said.
More than 4 million barrels a day of crude oil, or 4.7 percent of global production, are shipped through the Suez Canal or a pipeline that runs adjacent, according to New York-based McQuilling Services LLC. The canal, Egypt’s third-biggest source of foreign currency after Tourism and foreign direct investment, said in 2008 7.5 percent of world trade goes through it.
“It would be a worldwide mess if the canal was closed,” Pablo Mastragostino, a broker at Nolarma Tankers SRL in the Italian city of Genoa, said by e-mail. “Freight would go skyrocketing and whole trade routes would have to be reprogrammed.”
Egypt hasn’t witnessed a major militant attack since bombings in the Sinai resorts of Taba, Sharm el-Sheikh and Dahab between 2004 and 2006. Those attacks killed more than 150 Egyptians and foreign tourists. The government said at the time al-Qaeda had no role in the bombings, which were blamed on Sinai-based Islamist groups.
The last suspected militants to stand trial were those blamed for the bombing in Taba in 2004, said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamist groups at Egypt’s state-funded Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
No Indictments
“We have had tens of similar announcements in the past four years,” he said in a telephone interview today. “Not a single one of them ended with an indictment from the prosecution or was sent to trial,” he said.
Tests proved that the pistol seized with the suspects was used in an attack on a jewelry store in Cairo last year, in which the owner and four workers were killed. The suspects also included technicians able to manufacture remote-controlled bombing devices using ordnance from past wars, the ministry said. It said the men also confessed to trying to rob a pharmacy and forge money without success.
Egypt fought a long battle with Islamist militants seeking to topple the government in the 1990s. Egyptian political analysts say they haven’t since seen evidence of an organized revival of militancy in the most populous Arab country.
Suez Oil Traffic
The number of supertankers, designed to haul 2 million- barrel consignments, has dropped 70 percent over the past year as pirates operating in the Gulf of Aden to the south caused some owners to divert, according to McQuilling Services LLC.
A closure of the canal would force vessels delivering crude from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea to Asia to sail all the way around Africa, said Mastragostino.
Global oil supply was 84.4 million barrels a day in the first quarter of the year, according to the latest available estimate from the International Energy Agency, which will issue a new assessment tomorrow.
Source: Hellenic Shipping News
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