Fundamentalists Or Iraqi Agents Blamed For Slaying Of Parliament Speaker
Egypt honored its slain parliament speaker and four security men today with a state funeral led by a grim-looking President Hosni Mubarak. The government said Iraqi agents or Egyptian Moslem fundamentalists were to blame for the assassination Friday of its second-highest official, Rifaat el-Mahgoub. He was the first Egyptian politician assassinated since Islamic extremists shot President Anwar Sadat at a military parade nine years ago. Four assassins riding two motorbikes killed el-Mahgoub in a car driving by a luxury hotel by the Nile. The death toll from the attack rose to six today with the death of the speaker's chauffeur. Doctors in a Cairo hospital said the driver suffered bullet wounds in the stomach, back and arm. Hassan Abu-Basha, a former police minister, told the Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram he believed el-Mahgoub's slaying was the work of Iraqi agents. He said the perpetrators possibly belonged to the Palestinian extremist faction led by Abu Nidal. The funeral was at Nasr City, the same suburban neighborhood where Sadat's funeral took place. Hundreds of red-bereted military police and white-uniformed policemen sealed off all streets leading to the mosque where the religious service was held. They also lined the funeral procession route, as did hundreds of plainclothes security men. Mubarak, wearing a black suit and sunglasses, and British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, on a two-day official visit, were in the front row of about 1,000 mourners. They included relatives of the dead, government officials and foreign diplomats. Symbolic units from the military services spearheaded the procession, followed by a military band and two dozen wreath-bearers. Behind them were four military jeeps carrying coffins of the four security men, draped in the red, white and black Egyptian flag. A caisson bearing el-Mahgoub's coffin followed, also wrapped in the flag. It was drawn by three pairs of black horses. Military officers rode the three horses on the right. Immediately behind came two officers carrying el-Mahgoub's decorations laid on black-velvet cushions. The procession began from the mosque and stopped about 1,500 feet away. Relatives of the dead then lined up to accept condolences from Mubarak and other mourners. Interior Minister Abdel-Halim Moussa had warned days earlier of such an attack. He said authorities arrested alleged saboteurs who were entering the country with orders from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to assassinate Egyptian officials. Saddam has called Egypt a traitor to the Arab cause for sending its troops to back the U.S. military buildup in the gulf in response to the Aug. 2 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The state-owned newspaper Al-Ahram, quoting police sources, reported Monday that local Moslem extremists were collaborating with Palestinian terrorists sent to the country by Iraq on sabotage missions. It said the extremists had provided weapons and explosives to five Palestinians from Abu Nidal's faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Recent reports said Abu Nidal's Fatah-Revolutionary Council recently moved its headquarters from Libya to Iraq. Police ordered a state of alert at airports to keep the assailants from fleeing and set up security checkpoints along Cairo bridges. El-Mahgoub's authority extended solely over the 458-seat Parliament, which he had headed since 1984. He was not active in the gulf crisis, Al-Ahram noted in a front-page editorial today. ``In fact he was assassinated because he was a prominent Egyptian politician. The assasins wanted to tell their terrorist bosses that they pierced the stability of Egypt,'' the newspaper said. In Washington, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said: ``We are shocked by the assassination of the Egyptian speaker. ``We certainly deplore these kinds of terrorist activities and assassination is the most vile kind of terrorism. We don't have any indication at this time who was responsible or what their purposes were,'' he said.
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