CAIRO, 7 August 2003 — A jailed leader of an Egyptian militant group that killed 58 tourists six years ago said the Al-Qaeda network had “waded in blood” and harmed Muslims by sowing “wickedness”, an Egyptian weekly said yesterday.
“We have stated our rejection of the thoughts of the Al-Qaeda organization for a long time,” Karam Zuhdi, a leading official of Egypt’s Al-Gama’a Al-Islamiya group, said in an interview with the semi-official Al-Mussawar magazine.
“They have turned the whole world, including the ‘house of Islam’, into a house of war. They have waded in blood... and have not achieved one benefit for Islam or Muslims,” he said.
The remarks came in the latest in a series of Al-Mussawar interviews with imprisoned leaders of Al-Gama’a, Egypt’s largest militant group.
Al-Gama’a gained infamy for the massacre of 58 tourists in the southern town of Luxor later that year by a faction opposed to the truce. There have been no militant attacks in Egypt since.
All interviews have reiterated the commitment of jailed Al-Gama’a leaders to the cease-fire. Security analysts say the interviews are part of government efforts to give moderate Islamists a louder voice to counter any latent threats from those who still espouse violence.
While most analysts believe a tough Egyptian crackdown has largely destroyed the infrastructure of major militant groups, they say pockets of sympathizers may lurk beneath the surface.
Zuhdi, who heads Al-Gama’a’s policy-making Shoura council, also blamed Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda for triggering the wars against fellow Islamic states Afghanistan and Iraq and putting other Muslim countries at risk.
“Since Al-Qaeda declared that its international organization was hostile to the Christian West and the Jews, a huge international alliance — consisting of the Europeans, the Americans, the Russians and the Jews and most of the moderate Islamic states — has been formed to fend off the dangers of ‘Islamic terrorism’, as they call it,” he said.
Washington blamed Al-Qaeda for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Zuhdi told Al-Mussawar’s Editor-in-Chief Makram Mohamed Ahmed that a “great wickedness... appeared in the world because Al-Qaeda put attacks on civilians of all nationalities and races at the core of its aims, deluding themselves that this would be a point of pressure on their governments”.
Many Egyptians, including Bin Laden’s deputy Ayman Al-Zawahri, play leading roles in Al-Qaeda and feature prominently on the United States’ list of most wanted “terrorists” and suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks.
