Egypt's Hezbollah allegations at centre of regional puzzle (Feature)

By Rasha Saad and Elijah Zarwan Apr 23, 2009, 18:24 GMT

Cairo - Somewhere, in an Egyptian State Security dungeon, a Lebanese man called Sami Shehab (or Mohammed Youssef Ahmed, depending on whom you ask) is awaiting his fate. One of a purported gang of 50, he has been accused of being a Hezbollah operative plotting attacks on the Egyptian state.

Shehab is a small part of a story which, through rumour and counter-rumour, has electrified the Egyptian media for the last two weeks. By now it has become a much larger narrative about Egypt versus Iran, Arabs versus Israelis: In short, most of the issues that currently divide the Middle East.

But after the broad themes of the play, little else is clear.

On April 8, unnamed officials in Egypt's Interior Ministry told reporters that and a number of other men had been arrested for plotting attacks against Egypt and 'spreading Shiite thought.'

Since then, a series of leaks from the authorities have added undercover Iranian agents training Hezbollah militants, a gun-running route supplying Gaza with weapons (via Sudan), planning the assassination of Egyptian police, and espionage against Egypt itself. On occasion, the leaks have contradicted themselves.

Because the Egyptian government is communicating mostly via anonymous security sources speaking to the local press, it is very hard to tell what the official line on the story really is.

On one fact, everyone seems to agree: Shehab was a Hezbollah agent sent to Egypt to provide 'logistical support' to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Days after the story first broke, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah admitted as much in a televised address, but denied that Shehab was plotting attacks in Egypt.

For the moment, little else is clear.

Contradictory claims from different, anonymous security officials that, for example, Iranian agents had been, then had not been, arrested; that security officers were chasing a group of Lebanese Hezbollah agents through Sinai - then were not chasing them, have been compounded by contradictory claims about the provenance of intelligence that led to the arrests.

According to a report first published in the Israeli daily Haaretz last week, Israeli and US intelligence officers said they alerted Egyptian officials to the presence of a Hezbollah cell in the country. Egypt flatly denies an Israeli tip-off.

Defence lawyers say the confusion over what the 'plot' actually is has been compounded by government secrecy and a lack of coordination among the many lawyers defending various of the detainees.

Malek Adli, one of the defence lawyers, told the German Press Agency dpa that this was a result of the 'extreme secrecy authorities have imposed on the investigations.'

'We have not yet been able to see any reports on the investigations,' he said.

The contradictory reports have not done much to convince sceptical Arab pundits, such as the London-based daily al-Quds al-Arabi's chief editor Abdel-Bari Atwan, who described the charges as 'bizarre' and 'illogical.'

'We would have understood had the Egyptian prosecutor accused Hezbollah of trying to smuggle weapons to Hamas in the Gaza Strip,' he wrote. 'Hezbollah would never deny such charges.'

Pro-government Egyptian commentators have described Hezbollah, a political movement with ministers in the Lebanese cabinet that also maintains an armed wing that in 2006 fought a war against Israel, as a proxy Iran uses to spread its influence in the Arab world.

During that war, Egyptian protesters waved Hezbollah flags and cheered Nasrallah in demonstrations in front of the Egyptian Foreign Ministry to protest what they called Egypt's inaction during the war.

In a televised speech soon after Israel began its 22-day offensive in the Gaza Strip at the end of December, Nasrallah called on Egyptians to come into the streets 'by the millions' to press the government to open Egypt's border with the Gaza Strip.

Iran's support for Hezbollah and Hamas, its nuclear programme and its occasionally unsubtle barbs at Egypt have often rankled Egyptian authorities. This latest affair has further strained relations.

On Tuesday Egypt summoned the head of the Iranian interests section in Cairo to deliver a letter conveying Egypt's 'strong and total rejection' of Iranian 'intervention in Egypt's internal affairs,' according to the Foreign Ministry.

After Egypt first claimed have uncovered the cell, Ali Larijani, the speaker of the Iranian parliament, described the allegations as 'ridiculous and idiotic.'

Egypt and Iran have not maintained full diplomatic relations since Egypt offered the deposed Shah asylum after the Iranian Revolution, but Iran does maintain an interests section in Cairo.

Whereas Iran has jealously defended its image as the steadfast supporter of Palestinian armed 'resistance,' Egypt, the first Middle Eastern country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, has jealously defended its image as a crucial diplomatic interlocutor in attempts to reconcile Israelis and Palestinians and rival Palestinian factions.

With little visible progress to show on either front, even the suggestion of meddling in Egypt by the hard-line camp backed by Iran was bound to raise hackles.

'Egypt will not stand with tied hands, and will strike back against any attempt to threaten its security,' Egypt's flagship government daily al-Ahram trumpeted on its front page soon after the story broke.

The heated media campaign that followed the accusations and the baffling blizzard of sometimes contradictory reports security officials have leaked to the press have backfired, wrote best-selling Egyptian author Alaa al-Aswani Cairo's newest independent newspaper, al-Shuruq.

'The Egyptian government did not wait until the end of investigations, or for after the trial,' al-Aswani complained. 'Instead, it mobilized its troops of journalists and talking-heads to launch a major war on Hezbollah. The question is, why?'