EGYPT: The bombings in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula early on Saturday morning had considerable resonance in Egypt and the Arab world.
The well-planned and co-ordinated attack took place on the national holiday marking the 1952 republican revolution that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power and ousted the Egyptian monarchy.
Sharm el-Sheikh, the site of many summit meetings involving Arab, western and Israeli leaders, is known as a place for making peace rather than war.
Analysts suggest that the date may have been chosen by the bombers in revenge for the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood by Nasser after the movement attempted to assassinate him in 1954.
Egypt's third president, Hosni Mubarak, cracked down on the brotherhood and its offshoots when Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, was murdered by Gamaa Islamiya and Islamic Jihad in 1981 following the signing of a peace treaty with Israel.
Mr Mubarak has banned these parties and jailed thousands of militants but permitted a limited number of brotherhood supporters to sit as independents in parliament.
The Sharm el-Sheikh bombings have been claimed by the Abdullah Azzam Brigades of al-Qaeda in greater Syria and Egypt and by an unknown group calling itself the Mujahideen of Egypt.
Azzam was a militant of Palestinian origin who recruited Arabs for the mujahideen struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan and was assassinated in Peshawar in 1989.
Neither claim has been verified.
The Egyptian police believe there is a link between this attack and the October 2004 bombings at the Taba Hilton which killed 34 people, many of them Israelis.
The trial of two of the Taba suspects has been taking place in the Suez Canal city of Ismailiya since June.
The prosecution alleges that the Taba operation was carried out by local bedouin and Palestinians in revenge for Israeli policies in the occupied Palestinian territories and that the bombs used by them were crafted from munitions abandoned after Egypt's wars with Israel.
However, authoritative analysts argue that the Sharm el-Sheikh operation was more sophisticated than the Taba attack.
They suggest that Islamic Jihad, formerly led by Ayman Zawahiri, a senior al-Qaeda operative who was exiled by Egypt, may have reconstituted itself and may have carried out the operation, perhaps with the logistical help of local bedouin from al-Arish whose traditional occupation is smuggling drugs, cigarettes, and arms.
The Sharm el-Sheikh attack was the most deadly of 15 mounted against tourism targets since an ambush on a bus killed a British woman in October 1992 following the US-led war on Iraq which Cairo supported. This was followed by a string of incidents in 1993, 1994, 1996, and 1997 in which 97 people were killed.
Following a harsh clampdown on militants, tourists in Egypt enjoyed nearly seven years of peace.
The Taba attack, which took place as the Palestinian-Israeli peace process remains stalled and 19 months after the US-UK war on Iraq, was followed by three strikes in 2005.
