EGYPT: Egyptian authorities say they have identified one of the suicide bombers who carried out the country's deadliest terror attack in Sharm el Sheikh on Saturday as a suspect in an earlier attack on another Red Sea resort.
DNA tests from the man who drove a truck bomb into Sharm's Ghazala Gardens hotel established he was Yusuf Badran, a known Islamist militant from the northern Sinai town of Sheikh Zuwaid, police said yesterday.
Mr Badran's family told reporters that he was briefly arrested after the October 2004 attack on a Taba hotel but released.
The Egyptian authorities blamed the Taba attack on a radical network based among the Bedouin of the northern Sinai.
Although two alleged members of the network are now standing trial before an emergency state security court for the bombings, several others are reportedly still at large in the peninsula's interior.
The Egyptian authorities reportedly met Bedouin tribal leaders on Tuesday in south Sinai's capital, al-Tor, to try and gain information on suspects' whereabouts. Police have also arrested up to 200 people throughout the peninsula in a hunt for at least a dozen other suspects.
Sinai residents say the police have also cracked down on the back roads used by some Bedouin to smuggle drugs, weapons and illegal migrants through the peninsula's maze of razor-backed ridges, triggering at least one firefight in the mountains north of Sharm.
Police reportedly believe the bombers used these routes to circumvent dozens of checkpoints on the Sinai's main highways. At least 67 people including 16 foreigners were killed in the blasts.