Egyptians troops engage and kill militants in Sinai

Egyptian border crossing with Gaza Cairo – Akram Ali Egyptian troops have clashed with gunmen in the Sinai Peninsula, leaving three soldiers and six militants dead, as they pressed a drive to flush out armed Islamists, state television reported on Sunday. A security source told AFP that the clashes took place around the North Sinai village of Al-Gura, between troops and militants armed with rocket launchers, grenades and automatic weapons.
The source said a number of people were killed but gave no figure.
A senior security source had previously revealed that Palestinians from the Galgala extremist army were involved in last Sunday's attack in the Sinai peninsula that killed 16 Egyptian soldiers and led to President Mohammed Morsi vowing to clear the volatile region of militants.
The attacks were apparently planned by two Palestinians who escaped Egyptian prisons during the January 25  revolution and returned to the Gaza Strip, trained armed operatives on how to execute militant attacks and eventually carry out the Sinai attack against the "infidel" Egyptian regime.
A security source told the state-run Al Ahram newspaper on Saturday that the smuggling tunnels between Egypt and Gaza were the main reason for the attack.
In the Gaza Strip, an army was formed calling itself the "Galgala Palestinian Army"  as an armed Islamist movement. This army then recruited people from Sinai and other regions in Egypt and Palestine, eventually forming a 1500-strong army. Their goal is apparently to establish an Islamic Emirate in Sinai with Jerusalem as its capital, while conducting a jihad (holy war) against Israel.
Those who were caught escaped prison during the chaos that ensued during the 2011 revolution that ousted former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
The escapees included Hussein Rafie Radah, a chemist, who was arrested and got acquainted with Ramzy Mowafi, Palestinian doctor, in Wadi Natrun prison. They later met many supporters of the Galgala army after escaping prison and then regrouped for the Sinai attack. Other operatives included a man named Masoud Khalil Nasrawi, who was trained in Khan Younis and infiltrated Sinai in 2009 and was also arrested; Abdullah Suri, who was training the group in martial arts; Saad Sarhan, a Palestinian who helped storm the second section of Arish and the State Security investigations, while Hamed Hussein, also a Palestinian, who was arrested and later escaped, was trained in the "Zaaran Army" in Gaza.
The group reportedly functions on the principle that those who oppose their aims are "allowed to murdered". To establish their long-term goals, they allegedly attacked the Egyptian border outpost to steal military vehicles that would let them break into Israel and take over Jerusalem.
More than 30 militants attacked the border guard post under the cover of mortar fire and commandeered a military vehicle into Israel.
A medical source in El-Arish said Israel had handed Egypt six "completely charred" bodies that were in the armoured personnel carrier that drove into Israel and was destroyed in an Israeli helicopter strike.
He said one of the bodies was "probably that of the soldier who was forced to drive the vehicle." The militants had also used an explosives-laden truck that blew up at a border post.
The attack highlighted the government's tenuous grip on the Sinai Peninsula, from where Islamist militants have launched several rocket attacks on Israel and a deadly cross border raid last year.
The most recent attack presents a challenge to Egypt's new Islamist President Morsi, whose Muslim Brotherhood has good relations with the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip.
On Tuesday, Morsi visited soldiers wounded in the attack and hospitalised in Cairo, the official MENA news agency reported. He did not attend the funeral.
After Mubarak's ouster in February 2011, militants stepped up attacks in Sinai, prompting the military, then in charge of the country, to send reinforcements to the peninsula.
Egypt also closed until further notice its Rafah crossing with the Gaza Strip, the territory's only access to the outside world that is not controlled by Israel. It has now been partially reopened, only allowing Palestinians to return to Gaza.