Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Egypt Islamist group asks Muslims to keep off Al-Qaeda
Associated Press Cairo, May 26
Jailed leaders of an Egyptian extremist group urged Muslim youths not to participate in Al-Qaeda terror attacks, saying such acts were religious mistakes, a pan-Arab paper reported Monday.
Al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya's leaders, serving life sentences for their role in Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's 1981 assassination, said in a statement that terror attacks like those in Saudi Arabia and Morocco "put the whole (Islamic) community in a state of enmity with the rest of the world." Al-Gamaa was once Egypt's largest Islamic militant group and tried to overthrow the country's government during the 1990s in bloody campaign that killed more than 1,000 people. The group renounced violence in 1997. Al-Gamaa "appeals to all Muslim youth in Islamic and non-Islamic countries to refrain from any participation in the haphazard operations undertaken by al-Qaida, like the latest explosions in Riyadh and Casablanca, because it is based on obvious religious mistakes," the group said in its statement, which was published in the London-based Al-Hayat.
Mohammed Salah, Al-Hayat's Cairo bureau chief, told The Associated Press he received the statement Sunday from a relative of one of the group's leaders. This month's Saudi and Moroccan attacks killed around 80 people, including the teams of suicide bombers. Egypt has since put its security apparatus on high alert.
Al-Qaida didn't claim responsibility for the attacks, but U.S. officials suspect Osama bin Laden's terror network was behind them. na/pg
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