Ethiopia Holds 3 Egyptians in Plot to Kill Mubarak

Ethiopia has announced that it has three Egyptian fundamentalists in custody in connection with the attempted assassination of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak.

The suspects, the Ethiopian Ministry of Internal Affairs said in a statement late Tuesday, are members of Gamaa al Islamiya, or Islamic Group. They are religious zealots who have fought for three years to overthrow the Mubarak government and to turn Egypt into an Islamic state--an idea with little support among the vast majority of Egyptians.

All of the would-be assassins, who opened fire June 26 on Mubarak’s motorcade as he drove from the airport in Addis Ababa to a summit of the Organization of African Unity, were Egyptian.

Two gunmen were killed and one was arrested at the scene. Three other suspects, including the alleged ring leader, were killed five days later in a shoot-out with Ethopian police, the Addis Ababa government said. Another suspect fled the country.

There were conflicting reports at the time about the nationality of the suspect arrested on the day of the shooting, whom the Ethiopians now say is Egyptian and is one of the three men whose arrests were announced Tuesday.

Mubarak, an air force general who assumed the Egyptian presidency after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, was not hurt in the attack and flew home to Cairo immediately. He since has mounted a war of words with his nation’s southern neighbor, Sudan, which Mubarak has accused of sponsoring the assassination attempt.

“Investigations are presently under way,” he told the editor of a Kuwaiti daily, Al Siyasah, last week. “But we are definitely sure that the Sudanese government is behind the attack, because it sponsors terrorism and shelters international terrorists.”

The United States for years has accused Sudan’s fundamentalist government of playing a key role in international terrorism. Some of the Middle East’s most notorious terrorists are known to pass freely in and out of Sudan, and the Sudanese continue to train would-be terrorists.

Although Egyptians rallied around Mubarak after the attack, numerous commentators have suggested that he tone down his rhetoric against the Sudanese. Officials in Sudan have denied any complicity in the attempted assassination.

Mubarak has said that Egypt--which has a military might vastly superior to that of Sudan’s--will not go to war against the Khartoum regime over the incident and will find other ways to express its displeasure.

The Ethiopian government said it found weapons and explosives in houses the suspects had rented in the capital. One of the suspects rented the four vehicles used in the attack from two Addis Ababa travel agents, the government said.