Police in Egypt have arrested 25 Muslim extremists suspected of having planned a terrorist attack against Jewish pilgrims who visited the grave of the Kabbalist rabbi Yaakov Abuhatzeira near Alexandria several weeks ago. The suspects reportedly belong to a militant Islamist group and were arrested over the past few weeks in the Nile Delta. According to an Egyptian official, they were in possession of explosives and rudimentary rocket warheads and confessed to having plotted to bomb the tomb of a 19th century Jewish rabbi, to which hundreds of Israeli pilgrims come every year in January. The attack was to have coincided with the 2010 pilgrimage.
Egypt allowed the pilgrims to visit the shrine of Rabbi Abuhatzeira near Alexandria this year under tight security, after canceling the event last year because of Israel's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The official said the suspects believed in the writings of radical Islamist Sayyid Qutb, which had an influence on such militants as Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden. The Egyptian government executed Qutb in 1966.
The suspects will be handed over the state security prosecution for further questioning, he said. It was the fourth Islamist militant cell arrested in Egypt over the past 12 months. Twenty-six suspects accused of belonging to Hezbollah are currently on trial, accused of plotting to attack tourist resorts in Egypt and ships in the Suez Canal.
Egyptian police also said they had arrested an al-Qaeda linked cell that allegedly carried out a bomb attack in Cairo last year in which a French teenager was killed.
Rabbi Abuhatzeira (pictured), who was a son to a chief rabbi of Morocco, is revered by some Jews as a mystic renowned for his piety and for performing miracles. He was on his way from his native Morocco to the Holy Land in 1879 when he fell ill and died in the Egyptian city of Damanhour, near Alexandria. Abuhatzeira was the grandfather of Yisrael Abuhatzeira, also known as the Baba Sali, a revered rabbi and kabbalist whose tomb in Netivot is one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in Israel. Each year, several hundred Jews, most of them from Israel, pilgrimage to Damanhour.
