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Egyptian Salafist Considers Sinai The 'Next Frontier'

The lawyer for veteran jihadist Jamal, who has been linked to the US consulate attack in Benghazi, told Al-Monitor's Mohamed Fadel Fahmy that his client called the Sinai the next frontier in the "conflict with the Zionists and Americans."   
A Palestinian works inside a smuggling tunnel flooded by Egyptian forces, beneath the Egyptian-Gaza border in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip February 19, 2013. Egypt will not tolerate a two-way flow of smuggled arms with the Gaza Strip that is destabilising its Sinai peninsula, a senior aide to its Islamist president said, explaining why Egyptian forces flooded sub-border tunnels last week. To match Interview PALESTINIANS-TUNNELS/EGYPT REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa (GAZA - Tags: POLITICS CIVIL UNREST) - R

The Egyptian revolution came as a "gift from god," as one of the hundreds of jihadists released from prison after the uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 called it. Stockpiles of weapons have made their way into Egypt through the neighboring porous Libyan and Sudanese borders since the region has fallen into a state of lawlessness, which came with the shake-up of the security apparatuses in scarred nations searching for their new identities.

Al-Qaeda inspired groups in the Sinai Peninsula have puzzled the international community with their bold statements and videos posted on the net, but the various Egyptian security branches have not been able to pinpoint their direct involvement in any of the many military operations and kidnappings, or the weapons smuggling to Gaza through an intricate web of tunnels located in North Sinai, close to the Israeli border. The audacity of such militant groups has left Egypt and its neighboring countries with a national security threat that is brewing by the day, as the wave of violence and killing is broadcast on a daily basis on Egypt's dozens of television channels and talk-shows. 

Obtaining transparent information, specifically in national security cases, in Egypt has become a challenge, and the terrorism case known in the press as the "Nasr City Cell" is no exception.

The 26 Egyptians and one Tunisian officially accused of plotting attacks against the Egyptian government, leading opposition figures and media personalities have all denied these accusations. A security raid on their safe house in the upper-class neighborhood of Nasr City in Cairo on Oct. 24, 2012, left their financier ringleader Karim El Bedewi, a veteran jihadist, dead after a fierce gun battle. Footage broadcast on local TV channels portrayed security forces confiscating machine guns, rockets and explosives from the charred, damaged apartment and its rooftop, where members of the cell took refuge.

Local press announced that El Bedewi blew himself up during the attack. A forensic report presented to the prosecutor by Magdi Salem, the Islamist lawyer handling the case, proved that the corpse was intact and that he was shot dead. More importantly, National Security leaked news to the press that investigations led to the arrest of Mohamed Jamal al-Kashef (aka, Abu Ahmed), another veteran jihadist who had fought alongside the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaeda's chief in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. 

The international press took serious interest in the case after news emerged that the terror cell had connections to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The Wall Street Journal was the first to quote unidentified US officials accusing Jamal of establishing training camps in the Libyan Desert for a group of fighters known as the "Jamal Network," which allegedly took part in the attack that left the US ambassador and three of his diplomats dead.

Magdi Salem, the lawyer representing the terror cell and a founding member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad detained in the 80s for 20 years under the Mubarak regime, was recently released after the revolution alongside hundreds of jihadists _ including Jamal _ who were pardoned by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and more recently by President Mohammed Morsi.

"Jamal traveled to Libya alone, and his name was on the blacklist but [he] was eventually allowed to enter and fought alongside the rebels in the city of Ajdabya until Gadhafi was killed. He indeed established training camps for the rebels wishing to fight Gadhafi's forces and depended on local funding from different groups but had no intentions of killing Americans or exporting attacks onto Egyptian soil," said Salem, sifting through the case's thick file, sitting in the modest office of his recently established Islamic Party in Cairo.

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