Egypt Seizes Libya Gunmen, Thwarts Plot

Egyptian officials announced Monday that police have arrested a four-man Libyan hit squad and thwarted the second attempt in less than a year to assassinate exiled opponents of Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi.

One of the intended victims, former Libyan Prime Minister Abdel-Hamid Bakoush, said the assassins were apprehended in a shoot-out moments before the attack on the opposition figures was to have taken place at a farmhouse near Egypt’s Mediterranean port of Alexandria last Wednesday.

Announcing the apprehension of the hit squad, Interior Minister Ahmed Rushdi indicated that Egyptian intelligence was aware of the movements of the Libyan gunmen from the time they entered Egypt on Nov. 2. He said security agents followed the gunmen to Alexandria and recorded their actions on videotape before laying a trap for them on the day of the planned operation.

2nd Assassination Try

Besides Bakoush, who was the target of a similar assassination attempt last November, the gunmen had orders to kill Mohammed Mokaryef, a former Libyan government financial official, Rushdi said. They had been promised $4.5 million to assassinate Bakoush, Rushdi asserted.

The carefully-planned intelligence operation appeared to be an attempt to duplicate the success that Egypt enjoyed last November, when it not only foiled the first attempt to kill Bakoush but, through an elaborate ruse, exposed the Libyan plot and scored a major propaganda victory over Kadafi.

In that episode, Kadafi was tricked into believing that another four-man hit squad had assassinated Bakoush, who was Libya’s last prime minister under the Libyan monarchy overthrown in 1969. After the assassins--two Britons and two Maltese--were arrested, the Libyans were sent faked photographs purporting to show Bakoush lying in a pool of blood.

Two days after Libya announced that “the stray dog Bakoush” had been killed, Rushdi produced him at a news conference and explained the ruse.

This time, Rushdi said, security agents gathered a wealth of incriminating evidence including videotapes of the Libyans preparing their weapons moments before the attack was foiled when police closed in, ramming the assassins’ car with an ambulance.

Videotape aired on Egyptian television hours after Rushdi’s announcement showed the Libyans before and after their arrest. Gunfire could be heard in the background, and afterwards two of the Libyans appeared to have blood running down their faces as they were handcuffed and led away. The remainder of the evidence that Rushdi said was gathered was not immediately revealed, however.

Arrived in a Toyota

He said the hit squad had entered Egypt in a Toyota automobile in which they had concealed “three machine guns, four pistols, four silencers, eight bombs and some ammunition,” along with the equivalent of $30,000 in Libyan currency.

“They took a furnished apartment in Alexandria,” Rushdi told reporters. “We followed them closely with surveillance, tapes and video.”

On the day of the planned assassination, they drove to the farmhouse in two cars, Rushdi said. As the first vehicle approached the house, an ambulance concealing a squad of police came up the road from the opposite direction and rammed into the Libyan’s lead car.

‘We Heard Gunshots’

“We heard gunshots,” Bakoush said. “When the shooting stopped, we went out and saw three Libyans lying on the ground and one in the car. Two of them were wounded,” he said.

Rushdi, who said only that the Libyans were arrested “at the door of the farmhouse,” did not mention the shoot-out.

The incident, which Libya did not immediately comment on, was the latest in a series of actions that Cairo has accused Kadafi of plotting to foment unrest in Egypt and to strike at the Libyan dissident movement harbored by the government of President Hosni Mubarak.

Rushdi asserted that the hit squad was one of seven four-man teams set up by Kadafi to “liquidate Libyan exiles” living in Egypt. He added that Egypt learned of the plot through “sources who have infiltrated Libyan intelligence.”

Egypt and Libya have been at odds since 1972, when the late President Anwar Sadat rejected Kadafi’s proposal for a merger between the two North African states.