THE Egyptian authorities were forced last night to confront the unpleasant truth that the country had failed to tackle a new and serious terrorist threat aimed at destroying one of the pillars of the country’s economy.

After repeated assurances that counter-terrorist efforts had succeeded in the Sinai Peninsula, the triple bombing only served to expose the country’s key tourist destinations as vulnerable to further attack. The explosions in Dahab follow similar bombings in Sharm el-Sheikh, the main Sinai resort, and Taba, a small beach hotel near the Israeli border at Eilat.

After each of the previous bombings Egyptian security forces rounded up hundreds of suspects and later announced that home-grown terrorist cells had been identified and broken up. The assurances are key to maintaining confidence that Egypt is safe for the nine million tourists who visit the country each year, contributing £3 billion to the economy. However, as quickly as the Egyptian security forces are able to dismantle one threat, they appear to face a new danger.

Last night’s attacks appeared to be directed mainly at Egyptian and Israeli tourists, who celebrate holidays at this time of year. The prime suspect is al-Qaeda, which has made bombing hotels and resorts a hallmark of its operations.

Certainly President Mubarak of Egypt and his Government, which has close relations with the West, are high on the list of moderate Arab regimes that al-Qaeda seeks to topple. The Mubarak regime has a particular enemy in Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian-born al-Qaeda second-in-command, who was once jailed in Egypt on terrorism charges and has close links to his homeland.

The other fear is that Egyptians who travelled to Iraq and volunteered to fight with the insurgency may bring their fighting skills back home. A potentially greater threat, however, comes from a new generation of home-grown militants, the successors to the groups who waged a bloody insurgency in Upper Egypt during the mid-1990s.

Only last week the authorities in Cairo said that they had broken up a group of 22 militants from the Victorious Group, planning bomb attacks on “degenerate youth in tourist areas”, as well as on a gas pipeline near Cairo, and Muslim and Christian religious leaders.

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