CAIRO, Feb 24 (AFP) - Two Egyptian Islamists believed to be friends of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden were hanged in a Cairo prison on Wednesday, Islamist sources said Thursday.
Ahmed Sayyed al-Naggar and Ahmed Ismail Osman, extradited from Albania in 1998 after they were sentenced to death here in their absence, were presumed members of Al-Jihad, lawyer Muntasser al-Zayaat said.
The two were hanged in al-Itienaf prison and buried by their families later Wednesday in their villages in Giza, near Cairo, and Sharqiya province in the Nile Delta, said Zayaat, who often represents Islamists.
Yasser al-Serri, the head of the London-based Islamic Observation Center - which calls for defending the rights of Muslims worldwide - gave a similar account of what happened.
Naggar and Osman were arrested in Albania by Albanian security forces who were cooperating with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Egyptian police and Islamist sources said.
Naggar was sentenced by a military court here in 1997 for an attempted attack in a Cairo tourist area while Osman was condemned by a military court in 1994 for a failed bombing against former prime minister Atef Sedki.
Following their extradition, the two were also condemned to prison terms in another military trial in 1999, which was dubbed "the supporters of bin Laden trial."
Of the 107 Islamists tried in the new trial, 17 had been extradited from abroad, including 12 from Albania.
Information extracted from the 17 allowed police to obtain for the first time a full picture of Jihad's structure overseas, to dismantle Jihad cells in Egypt and arrest suspects who had infiltrated from abroad, police said.
Jihad is responsible for the 1981 murder of president Anwar Sadat.
Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi stripped of his nationality who lives in Afghanistan, is wanted by a U.S. court in connection with August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more than 220 people.
