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Invitation turned down

PARLIAMENT Speaker Fathi Sorour rejected an invitation from his Israeli counterpart to address the Israeli Knesset to mark the 25th anniversary of formal peace between the two Mideast neighbours, a parliamentary spokesman said. Sorour said he would not visit Israel until a Palestinian state has been created and Israel has withdrawn from all the territory it captured in the 1967 war.

On 4 March, Israeli Speaker Reuven Rivlin sent Sorour an invitation to address a special Knesset session to be held later this month to commemorate the anniversary of the peace agreement signed by the two countries in 1979. Rivlin expressed his disappointment in the refusal, saying he was sorry Cairo had passed up another "opportunity" to normalise its relations with Israel.

Student demonstration

PROTESTS against America's Greater Middle East Initiative erupted at Menoufia University, about 60 kilometres north of Cairo, on Tuesday. Police sources said 10,000 students took part in the demonstrations at the Nile Delta university. Security forces encircled the campus with armoured vehicles to make sure the demonstrators were unable to take their protest into the street.

Demonstrators also shouted slogans against Israeli incursions in Gaza, and condemned the American-led occupation of Iraq, as well as the French ban on girls wearing Islamic veils in state schools.

Swapping militants

YEMEN has handed six Islamist militants wanted for suspected links to Osama Bin Laden's Al-Qa'eda network over to Egypt. The group includes Sayed Emam Sherif, the former leader of the Egyptian Jihad group, said Yasser El-Serri, director of the London-based Islamic Observation Centre.

El-Serri said Sherif and the other men had been detained in Yemen for more than two years before Sanaa handed them over to Egypt last month in exchange for Yemeni opposition figures, as part of a security agreement between the two countries.

There has not been a definite official statement denying or confirming the extradition. An official from the southern Yemeni province Abyane was quoted, however, as saying that Yemeni security forces had arrested Sherif, along with a leading Yemeni Al-Qa'eda member named Abdul-Raouf Nassib, during a raid on a mountainous area known as a hideout for alleged Islamist extremists.

A surgeon in his early 50s, Sherif travelled to Afghanistan in the early 1980s to help fight the Soviet Union. A few years later, he joined the Kuwaiti Red Crescent in Peshawar, Pakistan. He reportedly moved to Yemen in 1996 after turning the leadership of the Jihad group over to Ayman El-Zawahri, who is currently Bin Laden's right hand man.

El-Serri said Sherif is number 104 in a list of 113 people suspected of belonging to Al-Qa'eda network. The list was issued following the 9-11 attacks on the US.

El-Serri said Osman El-Samman, alias Abu Islam El-Masri, who has been sentenced to death in absentia, was also amongst the six Egyptians who have been handed over.

A military court sentenced El-Serri himself to death in absentia in 1994 for his alleged role in an assassination attempt on former Prime Minister Atef Sidki, a charge he has repeatedly denied. El-Serri fled Egypt in 1988, travelling to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan and finally England, where he sought political asylum. There, he established his Islamic Observation Centre, a home-based media centre that receives statements from armed militant groups in Arab countries, Kashmir and elsewhere, and disseminates them to news agencies worldwide.

He's here

INTERIOR Minister Habib El-Adli told reporters this week that Mohamed El-Zawahri, brother of Ayman El-Zawahri, is being held in an Egyptian prison, and will stand trial soon. El-Adli did not say how long El-Zawahri had been in custody, who had extradited him, or when he would stand trial.

It was the first time that Egypt had acknowledged that it was holding El-Zawahri despite Arab press reports speculating that his extradition took place several years ago as part of a cooperative global manhunt against terrorism.

El-Zawahri, who was allegedly in charge of Jihad's military wing, was sentenced to death in absentia by a military court in 1999 in a case dubbed "the Albania returnees", for his alleged role in several militant operations.

His older brother, Ayman El-Zawahri, Al-Qa'eda leader Osama Bin Laden's deputy, was also sentenced to death in absentia during the same trial. The elder El-Zawahri had once led the Jihad group.

Despite his own active Jihad past, as well as years spent in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, the younger El-Zawahri is not known to have any ties with Al-Qa'eda. According to sources close to Islamists, Mohamed El-Zawahri's last known whereabouts was in the United Arab Emirates in 2001, from where, it is believed, he was extradited.

Nine projects

THE MINISTER of state for environmental affairs, Mamdouh Riyad, hosted a signing ceremony on Sunday for nine projects being implemented as part of the second phase of the Egyptian-Italian Environment Cooperation Programme (EIECP). Among those who attended the ceremony were Egyptian government officials, the Italian ambassador, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) resident representative in Cairo.

The three-year project aims to support Egypt's natural resources by testing innovative methods for better management of the country's most precious natural assets, while providing means to overcome the poverty of those areas' inhabitants at the same time. The projects will include developing methods for solid waste management in Minya, techniques for sustainable agriculture in Siwa oasis, as well as conservation of monuments in Saqqara and Fayoum. The programme will also create income-generating opportunities through eco-tourism in the environmental protectorate areas of Siwa, Wadi Al-Rayan and Gabal Elba.

Being conducted under the patronage of the Egyptian Ministry of State For Environmental Affairs, the Italian government and the UNDP, the project is being funded with $15.6 million in Italian assistance grants.