(Washington Times) Eli Lake - The Obama administration is engaged in a quiet and largely fruitless effort to persuade Egypt's security services to arrest scores of terrorists who were released or escaped from prison during the country's recent revolution. Daniel Benjamin, U.S. ambassador at large for counterterrorism, last month provided the military council in charge of Egypt with a list of about two dozen terrorists thought to be at large. The U.S. list includes Rifa Ahmed Taha, one of the original signatories of Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against the U.S. and, until his 2001 rendition and detention in Egypt, a senior leader of the Egyptian Islamic Group, the organization responsible for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Also on the list is Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman, the son of Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is serving a life sentence in a federal prison for plotting bombings of New York City tunnels in the 1990s. Also on the list are Shawky Salama Mostafa and Mohammed Hassan Mahmoud, who are connected to al-Qaeda and were captured by U.S. forces in 1998 in Albania but sent to Egypt for trial.
2011-06-09 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive