Al Kahira
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
.svg){kind=small}
Al Kahira (alternative spelling Alkahira , Arabic : Cairo , ex Swedish Ulla ) was an Egyptian steamer , which on 13 March 1959 Belgian Ostende by a terrorist bomb attack was sunk. The perpetrators were never identified. After the crime, the Red Hand was held responsible for the attack ; It has been certain since the mid-1990s that it was merely a cover organization of the French foreign secret service. The actions were therefore carried out by the French Service Action . The SA is said to be responsible for the attack on the Bremen cargo ship Atlas , which was sunk in Hamburg a few months earlier .
history
No special occurrences are known from the history of the ship. The ship was built as Ulla for the shipping company AB Transmarin in Helsingborg . In November 1954 it was sold to the Khedival Mail SAE in Alexandria for £ 170,000 .
On March 13, 1959, a severe explosion took place on board the Al Kahira in Ostend, which set the ship aground. It is not known whether people were harmed. On April 24, the sealed wreck was towed to Antwerp for investigation. Since it was apparently not worth repairing, it was scrapped in Bruges in 1960 .
In the context of the Algerian war, ships were sunk by bomb attacks in both Tangier and Hamburg that were suspected of carrying weapons, ammunition or explosives for the Algerian liberation front, so the suspicion fell on the Red Hand ; however, a perpetrator was never identified. It was only in the 1990s that it became known that the Red Hand was just a cover organization created by Service Action to cover up traces.
literature
- Gerard Desmaretz: Service Action. Un service secret pas comme les autres: formation, méthode et pratique , Paris (Chiron) 2007. ISBN 978-2-7027-1225-2