Last update - 00:00 05/07/2007
Egyptian police seize 1,200 kilos of explosives in northern Sinai
By The Associated Press
Egyptian police found more than 1,200 kilograms of TNT explosives Thursday buried in a northern desert on the Sinai Peninsula, a police officer said.
Capt. Mohammed Badr of the northern Sinai police force said officials discovered the explosives after receiving a tip from local Bedouin and were investigating who had buried them. The TNT was found in 27 plastic sacks near al-Raouda village, some 100 kilometers west of the border with the Gaza Strip, he added .
Islamic militants have carried out three major bomb attacks in Sinai since October 2004. The blasts in the resorts of Sharm el-Sheik, Taba and Dahab killed 125 people. The government blamed the attacks on a local Islamic militant group, which appears to have been inspired by al-Qaida ideology .
Northern Sinai has also been a major entry point for weapons into Gaza. Israel has repeatedly accused Egypt of not doing enough to stop smuggling into the coastal strip, particularly through tunnels. Egypt recently said it would make a greater effort to stop smuggling .
Earlier Thursday, an Israel Defense Forces magazine reported that Israel is planning to build a sophisticated fence to prevent smuggling and infiltration across its long desert border with Egypt .
Bamahane, the army's weekly magazine for soldiers, said in its current issue that the border fence would have sensors to pick up attempts to cross. Also, it would include obstacles to stop infiltrations. The article gave no further details.
The 220-kilometer border cuts through desolate landscape at the edge of the Sinai Desert.
Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in 1979, and the border has never been heavily fortified. In some places, it is not even clearly marked. Israel sends only mobile patrols through those areas, leaving the border wide open for smugglers to bring in contraband, drugs, illegal workers, prostitutes, and, most recently, refugees from Sudan.
There is also a security threat. In January, a Palestinian suicide bomber exited Gaza to Egypt, apparently through a tunnel under the border, made his way around to the Israel-Egypt border, crossed undetected and entered the southern Israeli resort of Eilat. There he blew himself up, killing three Israelis.
The IDF has long warned of arms smuggling across the largely unguarded border, supplying Palestinian militants in the West Bank.
The magazine quoted Col. Eitan Yitzhak, the commander of the Southern Command's engineering corps, as saying the border must be made impenetrable. We must make sure that we have the means to prevent terror attacks like the one that took place in Eilat, he said.
More attention has been given in recent years to the Gaza-Egypt border, the northern extension of the border with Israel. Digging dozens of tunnels over the past decade, Palestinians have smuggled in large quantities of weapons and ammunition. Israeli and Egyptian forces have been unable to stop the smuggling, though that segment of the border is only about 15 kilometers long, while the Israel-Egypt frontier is many times that length - underlining the scope of the task to close it off to smugglers.
The magazine did not say when the fence construction would begin, how long it would take or how much it would cost. Previous plans to fortify the long desert border, with price tags in the hundreds of millions of dollars, were never implemented.