Egypt says bombing group crushed

ROME — One day after police killed a man described as the mastermind of an attack last month at the seaside town of Dahab, Egyptian authorities claimed to have all but broken up a group that bombed several Red Sea resorts.

Nasser Khamis el-Mallahi, killed in a gunbattle in an olive grove south of the Mediterranean coast city of El Arish on the Sinai Peninsula, was the seventh person killed since police and soldiers fanned across the peninsula to hunt down suspects in the April 24 Dahab bombings. El-Mallahi also was involved in the effort to blow up international peacekeepers and Egyptian police at El Gorah in the Sinai shortly after the Dahab blasts, Egyptian officials said.

The Interior Ministry said in a statement Tuesday that "the mastermind and leader of the group that carried out the Dahab and Gorah explosions" was dead.

El Arish was the home of suspects in two previous bombings: an October 2004 attack in Taba and one last July in Sharm el-Sheikh. After those incidents, the government carried out raids in mountainous regions of the Sinai, killed about a dozen suspects and declared victory over the bombers.

But the bombings in Dahab, though not as deadly as the previous two, displayed the underground group's resilience. Police say they were carried out by suicide bombers; they targeted a restaurant, a pedestrian bridge and a cluster of three shops owned by Egyptian Christians.

Egyptian authorities say that all the Sinai bombings have been the work of one organization with no connections abroad, and in particular no link to al-Qaida, the global network of Islamic extremists led by Osama bin Laden.

Dissatisfaction among residents in parts of Sinai plays a role in feeding violence there, Egyptian officials say. Bedouins who inhabit the northern Sinai say they have been neglected by the central government in favor of the south, where the main resorts are located. They also express resentment at construction of a gas pipeline through the region to Israel, which they criticize for its treatment of the Palestinians. El-Mallahi was married to a Palestinian.

Nonetheless, the Egyptians acknowledge, el-Mallahi's group takes its inspiration from al-Qaida and is known as Monotheism and Jihad — the name once used by the Iraqi insurgent network now known as al-Qaida in Iraq.

Sinai's Monotheism and Jihad was founded by Khaled Mosaed, a dentist from El Arish who was killed last September while trying to evade a police roadblock. Members of Mosaed's group numbered in the hundreds, authorities said, and many are at large. They are helped by mountain Bedouins who navigate Sinai's rugged terrain more agilely than the police do.

Egyptian officials said Bedouin trackers led police to el-Mallahi's hide-out, and a suspect captured during Monday's shootout with el-Mallahi is a relative of Mosaed's.