[lbo-talk] Al-Islamiya tells Muslims to keep off Al-Qaeda

Ulhas Joglekar uvj at vsnl.com
Wed May 28 08:01:17 PDT 2003


HindustanTimes.com

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

© Hindustan Times Ltd. 2002. Reproduction in any form is prohibited without prior permission



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