Trainings

Shortly before 8:00 on Sunday morning, 18 July 1993, residents of the Zeinhom District of Cairo, a working-class neighborhood south and east of the mosque of Sayyida Zeinab, were awakened by the sound of gunfire. The street was beginning to come to life on the first day of the workweek. Students were walking to summer trade school workshops, glass merchants and street peddlers were opening their shops, the guard at a charitable kindergarten was unlocking its front gate. The traffic of office minibuses and trucks and taxis was beginning to thicken. A dark taxi stopped in front of the Zeinhom morgue and half a dozen nervous shabab got out, pairing off into three groups in the street. They were dressed in new blue jeans and T-shirts with cheap rubber “kootchie” sandals, and each wore a black cloth band around his forehead. Underneath these clothes they wore polyester athletic warmup suits, or “trainings.” In their hands were automatic rifles and 9mm Helwan police-issue pistols with extra ammunition clips tucked in their pockets. Under their clothing at least two of them carried hand grenades, and one wore a dynamite belt.

According to one account they screamed “God is Great!” and cursed before opening fire on a police car pulling up in front of the morgue. Their shots hit the building, a number of cars and two bystanders leaving their homes for work. The confused and contradictory newspaper accounts that appeared the next day portray a bewildering set of subsequent events. Some eyewitnesses said the young men got back in their car and pursued the fleeing police car they had attacked. Others tell of them fleeing together on foot, chased by another patrol car, which exchanged fire with them and eventually wounded one of them before it was disabled. Some saw a Honda half-size pickup being used as a getaway car, others reported one of the young men loping down the street trying to convince bystanders he was a police officer in pursuit of terrorists, and that he needed to commandeer a taxi and give chase. During the course of their escape the young men continued to fire their weapons and threw or discarded at least four explosive devices, one toward the wall surrounding the kindergarten, and two at the Zeinhom Youth Center. These had not been armed, but one bomb exploded near the morgue, scattering fragments for fifty meters but fortunately injuring no one.

As the police entered the pursuit, so did the residents of the Zeinhom and Sayyida Zeinab neighborhoods. Drivers, painters, deliverymen, butchers, kiosk merchants, locksmiths, restaurant owners, private guards, mechanics, and auto-body repairmen followed the fleeing youth, armed with rocks, sticks, and butcher knives. One of the young fugitives, probably wounded by police fire, was hit by a passing car and fell behind a parked vehicle whence he shot at neighborhood residents surrounding him. When his gun jammed, the locals jumped on him and beat him nearly to death. When one of the other shabab ran out of ammunition he met a similar fate before he could reload. He was beaten unconscious with rocks and sticks, but when one of his colleagues wounded him in the process of firing on his captors, the crowd dragged the bleeding youth to safety behind the walls of the youth center so they could deliver him to the police.

Two of the young militants forced their way into a Fiat 128 taxicab and ordered the driver to head for a main highway that would whisk them behind Salah al-Din's twelfth-century Citadel and then northeastward out of the city. A butcher's meat delivery motorcycle and sidecar loaded with a dozen angry neighbors chased it for two and a half kilometers, until, a hundred meters before the onramp, the taxi crossed the path of a police patrol car. The taxi driver slowed the vehicle and rolled out of the door, yelling for help. When the patrol car stopped and the officers got out, the armed men turned their rifle fire from the escaping driver to the police captain and his sergeant, wounding both in the process of pumping thirty bullets into their vehicle. One of the young men escaped into the nearby Sayyida ‘Aisha Cemetery on foot, and the other ran under the highway overpass, where he unhooked his belt and desperately tried to remove his jeans in order to escape, disguised in the training suit he wore underneath. But another patrol car had arrived by this time, and while one officer laid down cover fire, wounding the young man, another ran behind and killed him with two bullets in the back.

In the end, the moving firefight between the police and the young men—the latter used almost two hundred fifty rounds of ammunition during the chase—resulted in the wounding of at least four civilians, including a middle-aged woman out buying bread for her daughters, a local merchant, a bus driver, and an office worker. A seventeen-year-old secondary school student was killed by a bullet shattering his spine, and a handful of police and military personnel were wounded, including police captain Ahmad al-Baltagi, who died that afternoon in Qasr al- ‘Aini Hospital of internal bleeding from the bullet that ruptured his left femoral artery. Of the two captured militants, one, Ragab ‘Abd al-Wakil, a thirty-one year old from Dayrut with a secondary school diploma in industrial sciences, died of his wounds after five hours in police custody. The other, twenty-one-year-old Mahmud Salah Fahmi, a secondary student from the village of al-Qawsiyya in Asyut Province, was immediately detained at the hospital and placed under interrogation by police detectives and security officials from the Office of the National Security Prosecutor. The young man shot to death under the Sayyida ‘Aisha Bridge was more of a mystery figure. He was carrying forged papers identifying him as a twenty-five-year-old from Sohag, attending the University of Asyut. But—like the accounts of the chase—different stories on different pages of even the same newspaper gave inconsistent information about his identity. The three government newspapers reported his name variously as Muhammad ‘Atif Kamil, Muhammad ‘Atif Kamil ‘Ali, Muhammad ‘Atif Sadiq, and Muhammad ‘Atif Kamil Mustafa. But the name that caused the most excitement was al-Akhbar's page one identification of the young man as twenty-three-year-old Mustafa ‘Awni Kamil, the holder of a diploma in agricultural sciences and a fugitive wanted for the assassination of a state security official in Asyut (a front- page photo caption in al-Ahram concurred with that identification).

A search of the corpse turned up a bomb detonator, four hundred fifty Egyptian pounds, and a wad of newspaper articles about the hanging of five Islamists convicted in the case of fourteen men known as “The Returnees from Afghanistan,” referring to Egyptian veterans of the anti-Soviet Muslim resistance forces of the 1980s. In January 1993 the group had launched a wave of attacks in Egypt, first against tourist buses at the Giza pyramids and then in front of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Later they placed a bomb under a police car, which killed a member of the Cairo bomb squad, and finally on 20 April they ambushed Dr. Safwa al-Sharif, Egypt's minister of information, as he returned to his home one afternoon, wounding him, his driver, and his bodyguard. Their nineteen-day trial—heard before a military rather than a civilian court, as has been the custom for recent cases of political violence—ended with a guilty verdict on 27 May. On 17 July, a day before the Zeinhom incident, the five were executed and their bodies were transferred from prison to the Zeinhom morgue for their families to retrieve.

Based on Mahmud Salah Fahmi's statements to security officials, the young men captured and killed at Zeinhom were members of the military wing of the Jihad organization based in the southern province of Asyut, and were staging a revenge attack on the police and the medical facility, wearing black headbands to signal their state of mourning for the executed “Returnees.” They had arrived from Upper Egypt two days previously and surveyed the neighborhood at least three times before their attack, the last time on Saturday night, when they cruised through the area in a Honda pickup. The newspaper articles in the mysterious corpse's pocket had been part of an antiterrorism media blitz carried out in Cairo newspapers beginning the day before the execution. Full-page photo spreads of the blood-soaked bodies of victims, wounded and orphaned children, screaming mothers, and burning automobiles, had appeared under enormous headlines announcing “This Is Terrorism: Their Bullets Target Everyone!” ^[5] On the morning of the Zeinhom incident details of the Returnees' crimes, and of the conviction and sentencing, were accompanied by mugshots of the five newly executed men. The patriotic and religious rhetoric are impossible to separate:

In an application of God's Law and Revelation, punishment was carried out against five enemies of the people. They conspired in killing and sabotage. They shed the blood of the innocent. They corrupted and spoiled the very earth that God has promised as a safe haven. They wanted to frighten and alarm society and the national economy by trying to strike at tourism. They allowed what God forbade, and the court applied to them the Divine Ordinance of God and the ruling of the law.^[6]