Egyptian authorities have announced the arrest of 26 men, most of them engineers and technicians suspected of links with the terrorist al-Qaeda organization, on charges of plotting attacks on oil pipelines and ships transiting the Suez Canal.
The Egyptian Interior Ministry allege that the suspects, 25 Egyptians and a Palestinian, who had prepared remote-controlled detonators and explosives, were in contact with the Islamic Army of Palestine and were awaiting instructions from an al-Qaeda operative based abroad.
Egyptian authorities, who confiscated explosives, electronics, and diving suits, alleged that the suspects had prepared the remote-controlled detonators and explosives out of armaments left in the Sinai Desert from Egypt’s wars with Israel.
The US Energy Information Administration considers the Suez Canal and the nearby Suez-Mediterranean pipeline as one of the world’s seven most important chokepoints or transits for oil, whose closure “would add 6,000 miles of transit around the continent of Africa.”
Oil shipments from the Persian Gulf travel through the Canal primarily to European ports, but also to the US, EIA says, adding that more than 3,000 oil tankers pass through the Suez Canal every year, and represent about 25% of the canal’s total revenues.