PARIS: The close timing of the attacks which have killed more than 130 people in London and the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh was largely coincidental, with no mastermind behind the planning, experts said on Saturday, while stressing that the perpetrators were driven by the same ideology.
“Terrorism without borders”, headlined the Paris daily Le Monde, with a cartoon of a weeping globe wearing a “suicide belt” of bombs bearing the flags of Britain, Egypt, Morocco, Spain and the United States, the locations of the deadliest attacks attributed to Osama ben Laden’s Al Qaeda network since September 11, 2001.
“We have no specific information to make an (operational) link between London and Sharm el-Sheikh,” said Sri Lankan Rohan Gunaratna, considered one of the leading experts on Al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda assumed a global dimension immediately after September 11, and dispersed very significantly after the US intervention in Afghanistan aimed at striking at its roots, Gunaratna said, “and more than that, Al Qaeda endorsed so many other groups.”
“There are cells all over the world,” he said, adding, “some of those cells are operationally linked, but all are ideologically linked.”
Magnus Ranstorp, head of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland, said it was impossible to have planned and carried out the Sharm el-Sheikh blasts in reaction even to the first explosions in London on July 7, let alone those of last Thursday.
The last major attacks in Egypt, at Taba in the Sinai on October 7 last year, which killed 34 people, including a number of Israeli tourists, took seven months to set up, according to Egyptian investigators, Ranstorp said.
“So the operational planning of Sharm el-Sheikh would have been in place a long time ago,” he added.
“There’s no operational, logistical link” between the various groups carrying out such attacks, Ranstorp agreed, “but the link is in Al Qaeda as a revolutionary ideology.”
French criminologist Alain Bauer said the image of a James Bond-style villain, pulling all the strings from a secret base, did not hold water, adding, “Decisions on strikes are taken at local level.”
In London the July 7 blasts coincided with the meeting in Scotland of leaders of the G8 group of leading industrialized nations, while those in Egypt occurred on the 53rd anniversary of the country’s revolution.
The Al Qaeda Organization in the Levant and Egypt, which claimed responsibility for the Sharm el-Sheikh bombings on an Islamic website, said the blow was directed at “the Crusaders and the Zionists and the infidel Egyptian regime.”—AFP
