Bombs in The Name of Allah

They prefer softer names, like Islamists or fundamentalists, but these were trained killers. They loaded their bomb on a motorcycle and slipped it between two parked cars on a narrow, tree-shaded street outside the American University campus in downtown Cairo. As Interior Minister Hassan al-Alfi's black Peugeot rolled past, the terrorists triggered the bomb, blasting ball bearings at the Minister's motorcade and passersby on the crowded sidewalk.

The carnage on that leafy street was another link in a chain of bloody attacks that has swept over Egypt for the past 19 months. A shadowy coalition of Islamic fundamentalist groups has proved its willingness to use any means, no matter how lethal, to overthrow the secular government of President Hosni Mubarak, a key ally of the U.S. In response, the Cairo government and its security forces have shown they will raid, arrest and hang as many militants as they think it will take to stamp out the insurrection.

The motorcycle bomb was one of a series of similar assassination attempts on senior officials, though the first since April. In recent months the government had steadily intensified its crackdown on the militants, arresting thousands and executing 15. Last week's carefully planned assault looked like the radicals' reply to the suppression. Their brazen defiance was evident in the timing -- just before noon on a business day -- and the location -- the middle of the capital, a block from the Interior Ministry and from Tahrir Square, known to millions of tourists as the site of the Egyptian Museum.

The explosion killed four people and wounded at least 15, including al-Alfi, whose arm was broken. From the window of a second-floor office John Aydelott, a member of the university faculty, heard the roar of the bomb, looked down and saw a woman lying in the street. "Her shoulder had been blown away," he recounted, "and her legs were slashed. A man nearby was nothing but a torso."

One of the dead was Nazih Rashed, 35, whose leg was severed and who died later in a nearby hospital. He had apparently achieved martyrdom, since the extremist Islamic Jihad, or Holy War, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the bombing and saying he was one of the members who carried it out. Police had Rashed on top of their most-wanted list, and he was already on trial in absentia, charged with murder and membership in an illegal group responsible for the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat. Rashed, noted police, had been trained in the use of explosives when he fought with the fundamentalist mujahedin against the communist regime in Afghanistan. According to an Interior Ministry statement, the second assailant killed in the attack was a high school student, Mahmoud Hafez Zaki. The other two victims were a parking attendant and a Palestinian accountant who happened to be strolling by.

From his hospital bed, the 57-year-old al-Alfi, who directs the nation's hard-pressed 125,000-member police force, went on television to prove he had survived. The attack, he said, "shows the whole world that these terrorists are killers and butchers who have no religion or conscience. We urge all citizens to fight them."