Saboteurs bombed an Egyptian gas pipeline in the Sinai peninsula on Monday for the third time since February, cutting supplies to Israel and Jordan. Officials said a car had parked near the pipeline in the Bir al-Abd area, 80 kilometres (about 50 miles) from the northern Sinai town of El-Arish, shortly before the explosion. They said the bomb was activated remotely, without reports of casualties.
North Sinai governor Abdel Wahab Mabrouk condemned the bombing as a "terrorist act meant to jeopardise the stability and security of Sinai," the official MENA news agency quoted him as saying. A second device was found near the bomb blast "but the army has dealt with it before it exploded", said Magdi Tawfiq, head of the Egyptian Natural Gas Company (GASCO).
He told MENA that emergency services brought the fire under control and a committee was formed to investigate. "The company will work to fix the pipeline in Sinai as soon as the fire is completely out," he said. Witnesses said the flames at their peak reached as high as 10 metres (32 feet).
It was the third attack on the gas pipeline since February, a time of political upheaval when an uprising toppled former president Hosni Mubarak and saw power handed over to a military council. An April 27 attack on the pipeline in Al-Sabil area of north Sinai cut off international gas supplies. In February, attackers blew up a sector of the pipeline in the town of Lihfren, also in north Sinai, near the Gaza Strip.
Another attempt to attack the pipeline in March failed. An Israeli official dismissed fears of domestic power cuts following the latest blast. "At the moment there is no supply of gas from Egypt," national infrastructures ministry spokeswoman Maya Etzioni told AFP.
But "we are prepared, as always, with alternative solutions, with alternative supplies. There's gas from Yam Thetis," she said in reference to an Israeli offshore gas field. Egypt supplies about 40 percent of Israel's natural gas which is used to produce electricity.
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