Egypt army says it destroyed militant storehouse near Israel border
Published 26 March 2015 22:30
http://www.maannews.com/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=760118

CAIRO (Ma'an) -- The Egyptian armed forces on Thursday below up a house that
they suspected of being a militant storehouse in the eastern Sinai Peninsula
south of Rafah, near the Israeli border.

The army said that the house in al-Mahdiya village was being used to store
explosives, and that they had found 10 tins of TNT and C4 explosives.

Egyptian tanks shelled the storehouse and destroyed it.

The army claimed the house was being used by the Ansar Beit al-Maqdis armed
group, which has led an insurgency against the Egyptian state across the
Sinai in recent years.

Egyptian armed forces launched large scale military action against the group
in the Sinai Peninsula earlier in Sept. 2013, in what officials described as
the largest mobilization of force in the area since the 1973 war with
Israel.

The action came in the wake of rising instability and almost daily attacks
in the region since the summer 2013 coup by the Egyptian military which
unseated democratically-elected president Mohamed Morsi.

Since then, armed groups conduct a campaign against state institutions and
the military. The Muslim Brotherhood has condemned the violent attacks and
denied any link.

Muslim Brotherhood activists, meanwhile, have held weekly demonstrations in
protest across Egypt, which the army has violently repressed, killing more
than 1,400 and leaving tens of thousands in prison.

Critics of Egypt's military regime say that repression of dissent has only
encouraged many to take up arms against the regime, and Ansar Beit al-Maqdis
has frequently linked it uprising to the military's crackdown on the Muslim
Brotherhood.