Egypt: Hizbullah and Iran want to 'ignite the region'

The Jerusalem Post, Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah is "walking in the footsteps of his mentor," Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Husam Zaki told the Saudi daily al-Watan on Wednesday.

The spokesman accused the two Shi'ite leaders of wanting "to ignite the region."

"Nasrallah does not have the right to accuse Egypt of being a follower of Israel and the US at a time when he works on shattering the unified front in Palestine and Lebanon to implement Iranian agendas," Zaki said.

Hizbullah did not address comments from the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, but it did say that one of its senior members who escaped from an Egyptian prison during the unrest surrounding anti-government protests in that country was still in Egypt. Reuters had previously reported that Sami Chehab had arrived in Lebanon, according to London-based A-Sharq Al-Awsat Arabic language newspaper.

Hizbullah said that it would have properly welcomed Chehab, who was arrested last year for allegedly plotting to attack targets in Egypt, if he had arrived in Lebanon.

Also on Wednesday, Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman said that terror organizations are the primary threat to the security of Egypt and that many operatives of al-Qaida and other Jihadist organizations had escaped from the country's prisons recently. Suleiman also told Egyptian paper Al-Ahram that those terrorist organizations had refused to stop the violence and unrest in Egypt, which he seemed to blame on them.

Al-Qaida in Iraq called on Egyptians to free all those imprisoned by Mubarak's regime and called for holy war against Egyptian government, in a statement released to an Islamist website Tuesday, Reuters reported.

Calling for a strictly Islamic government in Egypt, the group said that "If the people of Islam die trying to reach this goal, it is better for them than having a tyrant who rules them with laws other than God's Sharia law," according to the report