Who controls the Egypt's largest Islamist militant group? This was the question on many lips in Cairo yesterday, after news agencies received a statement from the Gama al-Islamiya contradicting its Monday claim that the organisation was no longer targeting tourists.
Monday's more conciliatory message, which also claimed that the six men who massacred tourists in Luxor last month were acting without orders from the Gama leadership, was sent from the Netherlands by the organisation's media head, Ossama Rushdi. The second, more hardline statement was issued yesterday by Refai Ahmed Taha, a leader on the run from a death sentence and believed to be living in Afghanistan.
The conflicting messages are the clearest sign yet of a schism in the exiled leadership of the Gama, blamed by the government for masterminding the Luxor attack. Most observers in Cairo agree that the Luxor massacre, in which 58 foreign tourists were brutally murdered while visiting a Pharaonic temple, was a turning point in the five-year violent struggle between the Gama and the government.
The attackers are generally seen to have been from a new, fourth-generation of Gama members outside the control of the established leadership, signalling a high degree of fragmentation on the ground. With jailed Gama leaders in Egypt thought to have been discredited among the rank-and-file after calling for a ceasefire with the government last summer, analysts are asking whether yesterday's message is an attempt by leaders in Afghanistan to establish their militant credentials with the small, locally-based groups.
Others say that the unprecedented outcry at the scale of violence in Luxor made Gama members living in Europe afraid of losing their asylum status and forced them to distance themselves from the attack.