CAIRO — Egyptian authorities, faced with a growing wave of Islamic fundamentalist violence, unleashed a major new crackdown against suspected extremists Wednesday that left 26 people dead and at least 40 others wounded.
The death toll, which resulted from a series of bloody shootouts at extremist hide-outs in and around Cairo and at a fundamentalist mosque in the southern city of Aswan, was the highest in a single day since the abortive Islamic uprising that followed the assassination of former President Anwar Sadat in 1981.
Among the dead were four police officers, killed as they sought to arrest Islamic militants suspected in a series of recent attacks on police and on Christian jewelry shop owners throughout Egypt.
Also killed were the wife and baby of one of the suspects, Khalifa Mahmoud Ramadan, who was sought in connection with the assassination of a police officer last year in the city of Fayoum, an oasis west of Cairo. Ramadan was killed and the Interior Ministry said his family was shot "because the extremists used them as a shield in trying to escape."
The violent clashes came less than two weeks after a bomb destroyed a crowded coffee shop in downtown Cairo, killing three.
The homemade explosive, packed with nails, blew up on the same day that the World Trade Center was bombed in New York. Mohammed A. Salameh, who attends a Jersey City mosque led by Egyptian fundamentalist cleric Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, has been accused of "aiding and abetting" the New York bombing, which killed five people and injured more than 1,000.
The blind sheik's underground organization, the Gamaa al Islamiya (Islamic Group), has denied responsibility for both bombings, though Abdul Rahman has repeatedly criticized foreign tourists for bringing immoral behavior into Egypt and spreading AIDS.
Gamaa al Islamiya, which has publicly declared war on foreign tourism, stepped up the campaign last week by announcing that foreign residents and investors would also become targets of Islamic militants' "legitimate retribution."
With fundamentalist violence rising throughout Egypt, authorities have swept Islamic hotbeds throughout the country since late last year, arresting more than 2,000 suspects, and opened a major new military trial against 43 Muslim activists suspected in a wave of violent attacks against foreign tourists in Egypt.
