Egyptian man claims to find missile launcher in rubbish heap outside Cairo airport

An Egyptian man claims to have found a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile launcher lying in a heap of rubbish next to Cairo’s main international airport. 

The man’s claim could not be verified but if the weapon is real, it would mark an alarming breach of security in a country that has seen two passengers planes explode in the last two years. 

The find is potentially worrying for Britain, which closely monitors airport security across Egypt and is weighing whether to resume tourist flights to Sharm el-Sheikh after a Russian jet was blown up by an Islamic State (Isil) affiliate in 2015. 

The discovery came as Isil released a new video threatening Egypt’s Christian population and describing them as the “favourite prey” of jihadists. 

The Egyptian man, Ibrahim Yousry, said he found an SA-7 missile launcher on the side of the road around a mile north of Cairo International Airport as he headed to work.

The weapon has a maximum range of around 2.5 miles and so it could be used at that distance to strike a plane as it landed or took off.   

Mr Yousry wrote on Facebook that he was at first afraid to report the launcher to police in case they thought that he had something to do with it. But he said he ultimately decided it was too dangerous to leave the weapon lying around. 

“The airport is not far away and it could cause disasters if it was placed here for a reason,” he wrote. “The airplanes here are an easy target because they fly at very low altitude and this is the best position for this weapon to be used.”

The weapon did not appear to be loaded with a missile, he added.

He said he struggled to convince two policemen nearby to take him seriously but that they eventually took the launcher and carried it away.  

Mr Yousry did not respond to an effort to contact him. His Facebook post from February 18 began to go viral in Egypt and he eventually deleted it and replaced it with a cryptic note suggesting he was concerned about angering Egypt’s authoritarian government. 

“Fishing in troubled waters is not my style,” he wrote. 

The Egyptian foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

James Bevan, executive director of Conflict Armament Research (CAR), examined photographs of the launcher at the request of The Telegraph.

Mr Bevan said it was impossible to tell if the weapon was real based on a social media photograph but that it looked like an SA-7b, a common portable anti-aircraft weapon. 

A version of the SA-7 is manufactured in Egypt and many such weapons flooded out of neighbouring Libya after the fall of the Gaddafi regime in 2011. 

CAR has found SA-7 components in abandoned Isil bases in Syria and Iraq, suggesting that the group has found a way to access parts of the weapons. 

“If it’s real, it wouldn’t surprise me to find it there give the number possible sources and the number of actors that potentially have access to a system like this,” Mr Bevan said. 

A battery pack at the front of the weapon looked to have been made of improvised materials. 

It is impossible to know how the weapon ended up near the airport but the worst fear of Egyptian and Western intelligence is that it was planted by Isil’s Egyptian affiliate, Wilayat Sinai, to be used in an attack on an aircraft. 

Isil claimed credit for blowing up a Russian airliner leaving Sharm el-Sheikh in October 2015, killing all 224 people aboard.

Another 66 people were killed when an Egyptair flight went down over the Mediterranean in May 2016 as it flew from Paris to Cairo. The crash has never been explained but Egyptian authorities claim to have found traces of explosives on the bodies of victims. 

British aviation experts have been reviewing security at Egyptian airports for years, given the high number of UK tourists who visit the country each year. 

The UK halted flights to Sharm el-Sheikh after the 2015 explosion and is currently weighing whether to resume flying, as several other European countries have done. 

The UK does allow direct flights to and from Cairo and officials say they are satisfied with airport security at the Egyptian capital. But UK officials also gave Sharm el-Sheikh’s airport the all clear just weeks before the Russian airliner was blown up. 

An SA-7 was used to strike a DHL delivery plane as it took off from Baghdad in 2003. The missile badly damaged the aircraft but the crew were able to make an emergency landing without any injuries.

Isil released a new video on Monday showing the suicide bomber who killed nearly 30 people when he attacked a church in Cairo in December and the jihadist group promised more attacks against the country’s Christian minority.   

A narrator describes Christians as Isil’s “favourite prey” and says they do not enjoy the status of “dhimmis”, non-Muslims who were traditionally protected inside medieval Islamic empires. 

Instead, Christians are described as “infidels”. "God gave orders to kill every infidel,” says one of the jihadists featured in the video.