After a two-year campaign by Muslim militants to overthrow the Egyptian government, a familiar group has re-emerged with a new plan that is targeting the country's highest officials and threatening to sharply increase the level of violence, senior intelligence officials and Western diplomats say.
The deadlier tactics are a result of several factors, including involvement by Iran and rivalries within the militant movement, the officials say. They say many members of the group - Al Jihad, or Holy War - were trained in Afghanistan by Iranians and are equipped with powerful explosives."Things are going to get worse," said a Western diplomat who follows the militants' movements. "The explosives and materiel the militants have is much more sophisticated. There are people in the country now with the training to carry out large-scale terrorist attacks."
For two years an organization called the Islamic Group has been trying to overthrow the government. It has attacked officials, police officers, foreign tourists, Coptic Christians and intellectuals. Most of these attacks have involved two or three gunmen or crude, often ineffective explosives.
The violence has left more than 200 people dead, including dozens of police officers. Some 620 people have been wounded.
One part of the campaign has been an effort to cripple the tourist industry, which after foreign aid is Egypt's largest source of revenue. Despite the deaths of seven foreigners, many Western diplomats say the Islamic Group has tried to keep casualties to a minimum.
Now, they say, the re-emergence of Al Jihad - the successor to the group blamed for the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981 - has changed the rules.
The attempted assassination of the interior minister by a Jihad suicide bomber was the first huge blast to rock Cairo in the new campaign. The explosion left 5 people dead and 15 wounded, including the minister, Hassan Alfi.
Al Jihad also took responsibility for a powerful car bomb, detonated by remote control, that exploded Nov. 25 near the motorcade of Prime Minister Atef Sedki. The explosion, which did not harm the prime minister, killed a schoolgirl and wounded 21 people.
Leaders of Al Jihad have said in recent days that they plan to begin large-scale suicide attacks, similar to those that plagued Lebanon during the height of its civil war.
"We call it martyrdom," said the group's leader, Ayman Zawahri, in an interview two weeks ago conducted by facsimile from Switzerland with the Egyptian newspaper Al Arabi. "This is the beginning of change, but it is not new."