CAIRO: Egypt’s military chief of staff Sami Enan headed to Sinai on Friday to probe the deaths of policemen killed by Israeli gunfire the previous day, a military source said.
Security sources said that five policemen, including an officer, were killed on the previous day as Israeli and Egyptian troops combed the border area following attacks in Israel that killed eight.
Egypt lodged a formal protest to Israel over the death of members of its security forces, and demanded an investigation into the deaths, an Egyptian army official told Reuters.
Prime Minister Essam Sharaf called for a meeting Friday evening with the ministers of interior, foreign affairs, justice, international relations and health as well as representative of other concerned entities to review the security situation in Sinai, according to a Cabinet statement.
"Egypt has filed an official protest to Israel over the incidents at the border yesterday (Thursday) and demands an urgent investigation over the reasons and circumstances surrounding the death of three of Egypt’s forces," an Egyptian army official told Reuters.
"Enan will head a committee that will investigate the deaths of soldiers by Israeli gunfire," as they tracked down militants behind deadly attacks in their territory, the source said. Another source clarified they were policemen.
There have been conflicting reports from the military and police about how the Egyptian policemen died. A military official told the official MENA news agency on Thursday night they were accidentally killed by Israeli helicopter fire aimed at fleeing militants.
But on Friday, the state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper quoted a military official as saying the policemen were killed by gunmen trying to slip in from Israel.
Enan’s visit was announced shortly after another policeman was declared dead after a border gunfight on Friday, which left one of his comrades gravely wounded with a bullet in the head.
The military said on Thursday night that it was combing the border after gunmen, who witnesses said were dressed in Egyptian military uniforms, opened fire on Israeli buses and cars.
Israel said the militants had come from the Gaza Strip, and slipped into Israel through neighboring Egypt’s Sinai.
The attacks appeared to have caught Egypt’s security forces by surprise, as they engage in a sweeping week-long crackdown on Islamist militants in the peninsula.
The Sinai forms a huge desert buffer zone between Egypt and Israel, which sealed an historic peace treaty in 1979 after fighting two wars in less than a decade.
Air strikes
Earlier on Thursday gunmen killed seven people in southern Israel in attacks along Egypt’s porous border, prompting Israel to chase infiltrators along the border and launch an air strike in the Gaza Strip.
At least one person was killed on Friday when the Israeli air force targeted the Zeitun neighborhood near the border, medics told AFP.
The strike raised to eight the total number of Gazans killed in the past 24 hours since Israel began a series of retaliatory raids following shooting attacks in the Negev Desert that left eight Israelis dead.
Israeli officials have blamed a Gaza-based militant group called the Popular Resistance Committees, although the faction has denied any involvement.
"We salute (the operation) and we are proud of it, but we do not claim it," PRC spokesman Abu Mujahid told AFP at the funeral of five of the group’s members who were killed in a retaliatory Israeli air strike a day earlier.
"The occupation wants to pin this operation on us in order to escape its own internal problems," he said, referring to a wave of massive protests which have shaken the Israeli government over the last month.
Israel said the attackers infiltrated from the Hamas-run Gaza Strip via Egypt’s Sinai desert, despite stepped-up efforts by Egyptian security forces in recent days to rein in Palestinian and Islamist radicals. –AFP and Reuters
