CAIRO: Security officials have yet to identify the perpetrators of an explosion of a gas terminal in the North Sinai capital city of Al-Arish, which went off in the early hours of Wednesday, governorate secretary general Mohamed El-Keeky told Daily News Egypt.
The incident forced authorities to shut down the gas pipeline which supplies gas to Israel and Jordan in El-Sabeel terminal.
The initial investigation, according to Sherif Ismail, North Sinai national security advisor, indicated that five masked gunmen stormed the facility, about 50 km from the Israeli border, at about 4 am, threatening the two civilian guards protecting the area.
“The masked men planted explosive devices almost 150 meters away from the pipeline after threatening the [two] guards protecting the facility and tied them up … and took them away from the explosion site,” El-Keeky explained.
“Afterwards, they stepped about 700 meters back, setting off the explosives via remote control, which set the target ablaze,” he added.
The facility, not far from a residential area, remained on fire for four hours before firefighters extinguished it with the help of military forces.
Eyewitnesses in El-Sabeel village said they saw the flames at least 20 km away from the area rising hundreds of meters high.
No injuries or deaths were reported. But the initial losses, according to a gas expert who preferred to remain anonymous, may amount to $10 million.
Shutting down the terminal led to a shortage in the supply of natural gas to Al-Arish homes as well as to a cement factory in central Sinai.
No one had claimed responsibility for the attack by press time, but suspicion may fall on Sinai’s Bedouins angered by what they see as the neglect of their areas by the central government, or militants opposed to the export of natural gas to Israel.
The perpetrators managed to escape into the Sinai Peninsula desert as security and military police forces were deployed at the entrances and exists of Al-Arish in an attempt to capture them.
"Those who carried out the explosion have harmed the people of Sinai more than any others," said Abdul-Wahab Mabrouk, the governor of North Sinai, while inspecting the site. He said the explosion also damaged the local power plant and gas leaks forced people to evacuate their homes.
Prime Minister Essam Sharaf visited Sinai earlier this week, pledging to address their grievances and direct more state funds to the development of their areas.
The attack was preceded by another carried out on March 27 when gunmen planted explosives at the terminal, but they failed to detonate.
Wednesday’s attack erupted a few days after prosecutor General Abdel Meguid Mahmoud had referred former petroleum minister Sameh Fahmy and six other officials to court on charges related to the natural gas deal with Israel.
Fahmy and the others were accused of "committing the crimes of harming the country’s interests, squandering public funds and enabling others to make financial profits through selling and exporting Egyptian gas to the state of Israel at a low price below international market rates at the time of the contract."
The statement said the deal in question caused Egypt losses worth more than $714 million and enabled a local businessman, also indicted in the same case but at large, to make financial profits.
The induced-blast raised the concerns of Israeli officials over the future supply of the country’s gas needs, of which 40 percent come from Egypt.
A few hours after the attack, Israel-based Haaretz newspaper quoted a senior Israeli official as saying that the country needs to prepare itself for a future without Egyptian natural gas supplies.
Speaking with Army Radio, National Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau warned that Israel "should be prepared for a situation where gas flow from Egypt would stop," the report added.
Haaretz further cited a former Israeli intelligence agency — Mossad — official Danny Yatom as saying the sabotage, the second such incident in recent months, may be a trend Israel would have to deal with in the foreseeable future.
"It’s a problem we’ll probably live with for a while," Yatom said, adding that a way of dealing with the issue would be "accelerating the gas supply from the Tamar and Leviathan sites, thus speeding the arrival of gas from those locations into power stations and reducing our need for Egyptian gas."
Earlier in March, Egyptian Petroleum Minister Abdullah Ghorab said talks were underway to adjust gas contracts — especially the Israel deal.
Ghorab said media campaigns and public disapproval of gas exports were a sufficient basis for negotiating greater benefits for Egypt.
Political forces and activists have repeatedly accused the former regime of wasting Egypt’s resources for the sake of an “enemy state,” and launched a long legal battle against the petroleum ministry.
The legal battle ended with the Supreme Administrative Court authorizing the sale of gas to Israel in February 2010, while adding that the government should monitor the prices and the quantity of its exports.
Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports said that Israel agreed to allow Egypt to increase the number of army forces in North Sinai in order to combat any future attempts to sabotage the gas terminal.
Egypt is allowed to deploy a limited number of armed forces across the border with Israel based on a peace treaty signed between the two countries in 1978. –Additional reporting by Hatem El-Bolouk and Agencies.
