Egypt : Muslim Brotherhood President Frees Monster in Brutal Luxor Massacre

Egypt : Muslim Brotherhood President Frees Monster in Brutal Luxor Massacre

by Daniel Greenfield//

President Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Monster-in-Charge of Egypt, has announced the pardon of Mostafa Hamza, a leader of The Islamic Group.

Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya leader Mostafa Hamza, detained for terrorist activity and attempt on Hosni Mubarak’s life, released Tuesday by President Morsi’s pardon. Hamza, a leading member of Islamic organisation Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya, was extradited to Egypt from Iran in 2004. He was detained following terrorism-related charges that included being a member of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Forget Mubarak, Hamza was responsible for a lot of atrocities, but his ugliest hour may have been the Luxor Massacre.

Six black-garbed gunmen killed two police officers and shot unarmed ticket-takers Monday while taking over the temple compound.

They then took their time–”dancing and singing” for an hour, one survivor said–as they slaughtered and mutilated helpless visitors from Switzerland, Japan, Germany, Britain and several other countries.

Police said Thursday that a note found in the wallet of one of the attackers said the operation had been ordered by an Islamic Group leader, Mustafa Hamza, who is believed to be in hiding in Afghanistan.

The Luxor Massacre has been mostly forgotten, but it deserves to be remembered as a template of the Islamist soul. The full horror of what happened there needs to be understood for us to understand what Morsi has just done.

As they ran past a Japanese tourist, she said, one of the men fired into the woman’s face from a range of about 15 inches.

“They made us get down on our knees,” Ms Dousse said. “And then they started shooting. A man who was very heavy fell on me and the lady behind me also covered me … They shot me in the arm and leg, and then they started again shooting those who were still alive in the head.

The gunmen “took all the young women, the girls, and disappeared with them. I don’t know where they went with the women, but they hurt them. We could hear screams of pain,” Dousse said.

“It went on for a long time, an hour or an hour and a half. The terrorists came back again and again; they danced and sang,” she said.

Among the horrors, the marauders cut off the ears and noses of several of their victims. A note praising Islam was found inside one disemboweled body.

The foreign dead included 31 Swiss, 10 Japanese, five Germans, four Britons one a child a Bulgarian, a Colombian and a French citizen. The Japanese victims were four newlywed couples and an elderly couple on their second honeymoon.

A statement issued in the name of Egypt’s most prominent Islamic militant group said that the massacre had begun as an effort to take hostages in order to secure the release of a leader imprisoned in New York for his role in the World Trade Center bombing. But the accounts by survivors gave no hint of any attempts to take tourists alive – only to kill and, perhaps, to butcher, them.

The terrorists came back, as they sang, danced and shouted “Allah, Allah …”. It took an eternity before help arrived.

Two British backpackers told last night how a screaming terrorist slit the throat of a tourist as he begged for mercy.  Stuart Bentley and Paula Wainwright watched terrified from behind a pillar as the black-clad gunman first riddled the man’s legs with bullets as he tried to flee.

Stuart said: “I saw three men dressed in black.They were screaming something, almost like a chant, and shooting indiscriminately.

“I saw one man, who looked European, trying to run away. He was shot in the legs, rolled over and clasped his hands together as if begging for his life. But the gunman just cut his throat and began firing again.”

The remains of the Luxor massacre victim Joan Turner were eventually flown back to Britain yesterday. The body of her daughter, Karina, is still missing.

Behind the difficulties in identifying the bodies of the family lies the brutal fact that their Muslim fundamentalist killers had deliberately disfigured the bodies of their victims after stripping them. They had been shot in the face after they were dead.

After the September 11, 2012 attacks, Morsi pardoned one of the worst monsters in the ranks of Egyptian Salafists, the man who ordered this atrocity. This is not an accident, this is a message. It is a statement from the Muslim Brotherhood that Obama has put in charge of Egypt. “I am with you.”

Whatever outrage there was over the freeing of the Lockerbie bomber should be doubled and trebled in this case. The Luxor Massacre was far more horrifying than Lockerbie. It was closer to Beslan and Morsi has made it clear that his new Egypt is on the side of the perpetrators of the Luxor Massacre.

1997 luxor massacre tribute –

Never forget  !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!! !!

Luxor Survivors Say Killers Fired Methodically

By ALAN COWELL and DOUGLAS JEHL Published: November 24, 1997

When Linka Fingerhuth, 32, a Swiss tourist, heard the pop-popping of automatic rifle fire at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, Egypt, last Monday, she thought that someone was shooting at a troublesome dog she could see scuttling away in the distance. But she soon discovered that she was a likely target herself.

Crouched behind one of the soaring columns that distinguish the 3,400-year-old temple — a ”must” destination for foreign visitors to Egypt — Ms. Fingerhuth, a magazine journalist from Zurich, peered down toward the temple entrance.

”People were running away, left and right,” she said in an interview at her home. Two tourists standing atop a ramp leading to the temple’s middle courtyard suddenly keeled over awkwardly, as if to pick something up from the ground, she said.

Then she understood why: sprinting toward her hiding place were two men carrying assault rifles. As they ran past a Japanese tourist, she said, one of the men fired into the woman’s face from a range of about 15 inches.

The close-range salvos and the chaos were the start of a half-hour of relentless and systematic terror. In the next 30 to 35 minutes, 58 foreigners — 35 of them Swiss — and 4 Egyptians, along with 6 gunmen, would perish in the worst terrorist attack ever in Egypt — an assault for which the militant Islamic Group quickly took responsibility.

Some Answers To the Rumors

A welter of rumors and unanswered questions followed the mayhem. Did the attackers, as some witnesses suggested, sexually moleste young women? Did they dance on mutilated dead bodies? Was there any immediate response from the Egyptian security forces?

From interviews with survivors and Egyptian investigators, from the published statements of other survivors and from the reports of forensic specialists in Switzerland, some answers are emerging.

The attack appears to have been as methodical as it was gruesome. The six gunmen operated in pairs, Egyptian investigators say, with the two men who killed the police guards then taking their place near the temple entrance to ward off an expected counterattack that never came.

The other four attackers carried out most of the killing, investigators say, splitting off right and left as they rushed into the middle courtyard and toward the crowds of tourists like Ms. Fingerhuth among the columns at the rear.

In all, the gunmen carried six automatic rifles, three butcher knives, two pistols and a police walkie-talkie taken from one of the slain guards. Beneath their coats they had stashed clipload after clipload of ammunition: their supply was still not exhausted when the last five of them were finally killed by the police three hours later, near the Valley of the Queens.

Most of the victims were shot in the head and chest, suggesting an attack that proceeded with discipline and precision, Egyptian investigators said. Some were slashed and hacked with knives, so viciously in one case that a victim’s head was nearly severed, witnesses and Egyptian investigators said.

Aim Said to Be Death, Not Mutilation

Egyptian and Swiss forensic experts said many of the victims had been utterly disfigured by gunshot and stab wounds. Egyptian officials say they have found no evidence that victims were intentionally mutilated, although the officials and witnesses confirmed that some of the victims had been ”finished off with knives” after first being wounded with gunshots.

Several witnesses, including Abdelnasser Ahmed Ibrahim, 27, an unarmed guard employed by the Government to watch over the temple’s ancient treasures, said some knife wounds had been particularly horrific: one woman’s stomach had been so badly slashed that it gaped open, he said.

But Egyptian investigators said there was no evidence to corroborate a report in a Swiss newspaper that a German woman saw her father beheaded. They said the grievous facial wounds attributed by some witnesses to deliberate mutilation seemed to have been caused by automatic rifles fired from very close range.

One wounded Swiss witness, Rosemarie Dousse, 66, has that said young women were separated from the groups of tourists and led away to be sexually abused. But Egyptian officials said they had found no evidence of such abuse, and Ms. Fingerhuth and Egyptian and foreign witnesses reported seeing no sign that any tourists had been singled out in this way.

Egyptian investigators have been able to identify only one of the assailants, even though photographs of the bodies of five of the six men have been published in Egyptian newspapers.

The sole gunman identified, Methat Ahmed Abdelrahman, had been sought by the police as a suspected terrorist, but there was no evidence that he had taken part in previous attacks.

A note found in one gunman’s pocket suggested that the attackers were aligned with Mostapha Hamza, a leader of the Islamic Group who is believed to be in Afghanistan, but how and where the assault was planned remains a mystery.

Gunmen Were Able To Kill at Will

What is now beyond doubt is that from the moment the attack began, the assailants were able to kill at will.

”I kept waiting to hear someone firing back, but there was nothing,” said Ms. Fingerhuth, a widow who had left her two young children — Anna, 5, and Balz, 3 — with relatives in Zurich while she went on vacation.

When it began, Ms. Fingerhuth said, she and a group of about a dozen tourists were inspecting a wall-relief in a small side chapel several hundred yards above and beyond the entrance.

Then they entered the chapel just as the shooting began.

”I saw a dog running, and I said, ‘They are shooting at the dog,’ ” Ms. Fingerhuth recalled.

Then came the realization that the temple was under attack, and Ms. Fingerhuth thought that one of the attackers had caught sight of her.

She and three others — her friend Trix Nigg, 33, Felix E. Muller and his wife, who was not identified by name, clambered over a wall and took cover in a small ruined enclosure.

As they cowered low, they would later learn, other tourists less than 20 feet away were trapped among the sandstone pillars of ancient colonnades, from which there was no escape.

”Now the shooting is very close,” Mr. Muller, a journalist, wrote on Tuesday in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung newspaper. ”There are hysterical screams, rending cries, Arabic commands — all sending multiple echoes from the rock walls around us.”

But at the end, Ms. Fingerhuth said, ”there were only the screams of the victims, and the attackers shouting, ”Allah u Akbar!” — ”God is most great!” — both a religious utterance and the rallying cry of Islamic fundamentalism across the Muslim world.

No Sign of Police For a Long Time

It is clear that the six men who carried out the attack met with no armed resistance until long after they fled in a taxi and then a hijacked bus, some 45 minutes after the massacre began.

By killing two police guards posted 400 yards apart at the outset of the assault, the gunmen eliminated the only armed security at the site, Egyptian investigators say. Reinforcements did not arrive until after the attackers left.

”We cannot let the police off the hook,” said a senior Egyptian investigator who spoke on condition of anonymity. ”We understand that it was a terrorist attack, but if the police had responded more quickly, many lives would have been saved.”

Only 20 or 30 minutes after the attack ended and Ms. Fingerhuth left her hiding place did she and other survivors encounter police reinforcements approaching the temple in a jeep as a tour bus was carrying the survivors, including four wounded tourists, back to Luxor.

Indeed, she said, Egyptian civilians and tour guides were the first to rescue survivors and try to tend wounded and dead. From the accounts of Ms. Fingerhuth and Mr. Muller, it seems that the terrorists crisscrossed the temple’s middle court, moving away then returning to gun down people who had taken cover and who screamed in terror when they were discovered.

Fear Has Not Left The Survivors

Although the attack began about 8:45 A.M., it was not until noon that the police finally cornered the last five of the gunmen after chasing them for more than two hours through the stark desert hills.

During that chase, the sixth gunman, who collapsed after being wounded, was killed by his companions, apparently to prevent his capture, Egyptian investigators said. As the two sides exchanged fire throughout the pursuit, tourists across the area were ordered to take cover in ancient tombs.

”After a period of calm, we came up thinking it was safe, but the firing started again,” Karen Dean, an Egyptology student from Warwick University in England who was among those pinned down in the latter stage of the morning melee told reporters on her return home. ”This time the police started firing back. There was fear in their eyes, and they were firing large rifles.”

The fear has not yet left survivors like Ms. Fingerhuth. After her return home on Tuesday, she said, she thought she was dreaming that a terrorist wanted to kill her, then that another tourist wanted to share her hiding place and she was saying there was no room.

Then, she said, she awoke to find that ”it was my daughter asking to get into bed with me.”

This a video Tribute to the 1997 massacre of 62 innocent victims at the Luxor temple in Egypt

6 Islamist militants attacked tourists with assault rifles and machetes

Of the people that died  was three generations of one British family
that included a 5 year old girl

Other victims included 36 Swiss tourists and 10 Japanese couples, many of them on their honeymoon. Also killed were 4 Egyptian guides, 4 Germans and 2 Columbians

A Knights Templar Never Forgets

http://www.checkpoint-online.ch/CheckPoint/Suisse/Sui0018-Louxor5AnsApres.html

http://iranaware.com/2012/09/29/egypt-muslim-brotherhood-president-frees-monster-in-brutal-luxor-massacre/