At least 613 suspected Muslim extremists have been arrested in a major security sweep in a Cairo district, including an alleged cell leader reported to have been planning attacks on 22 cinemas.
The security operation in the western Cairo suburb of Imbaba, which involved 14,000 policemen, entered its fifth day Saturday.The crackdown signaled an increasingly get-tough government policy in fighting the extremists, who want to replace President Hosni Mubarak's secular administration with a Muslim theocracy.
"We are going to continue that operation until we clean Imbaba completely of the extremists," said Maj. Gen. Galal el-Shamy, the chief Interior Ministry spokesman.
The Imbaba dragnet, which began Tuesday, was preceded and accompanied by smaller police sweeps in southern Egypt, where extremists mounted many attacks on police, Christians and foreign tourists this year, killing 78 people.
Security officials and newspapers said that at least 613 suspected Muslim militants have been arrested in Imbaba.
Friday's arrest of Sheik Gaber Mohamed Aly, the alleged leader of Islamic extremist cells in poor and overcrowded Imbaba, was splashed across the front pages of Cairo newspapers today.
"I ordered my boys to attack 22 cinemas in Cairo and Giza with explosives in an attempt to divert the attention of police from Imbaba," Aly was quoted by the newspaper Akhbar el-Yom as saying. "That way, police would have loosened their dragnet in Imbaba, and maybe I could have gotten away."
Security officials consider Aly's arrest a major prize of the Imbaba operation. They said authorities had been incensed by some Western media reports picturing Aly as running "a state within a state" at Imbaba.