Further Thoughts on the Cairo Bombing

A day after the Hussein bombing we don't know much more: three people have been arrested, but this may be a reflexive "round up the usual suspects" reaction; there is still some confusion about whether the explosive was thrown or planted, and some reports suggest it might have been a hand grenade or other small explosive.

Although there were quite a few wounded, the fact that there was only one fatality suggests this was a small explosive; the photos I've seen show little damage to structures. This may have been, like the 2005 bombing in the Khan al-Khalili, a fairly unsophisticated, even amateurish, operation, perhaps a one or two person operation. It definitely sounds like it was aimed at hurting tourism. But it's a much more limited attack than the Sinai bombings in 2005 and 2006, closer to the 2005 attacks near the Egyptian museum and in the Khan.

I noted yesterday that I don't give credence to the conspiracy theorists' idea that the government might have done this to gain support for the anti-terrorism bill, which is supposed to replace the state of emergency. I still don't, in part because the Egyptian Parliament will pass the bill easily anyway and hardly needs to rally support given its overwhelming majority for the ruling party, but we can probably count on the government to use the bombing as a reason for institutionalizing broad counterterrorist powers.

More as things develop -- unless, as sometimes happens in these cases, the whole thing goes down the memory hole and we never hear any details of the three people supposedly arrested.

UPDATE: Juan Cole's commentary on the bombings, including his reverie on old times in the Khan al-Khalili. Certainly all of us who lived in Cairo have memories of the locale of this bombing; as a young medieval historian back in the 1970s I spent a lot of time in the medieval buildings that may still be found along the winding streets of the area.