Attacks in UK, Egypt linked by ideology

"Terrorism without borders", headlined the Paris daily Le Monde, with a cartoon of a weeping globe wearing a "suicide belt" of bombs bearing the flags of Britain, Egypt, Morocco, Spain and the United States, the locations of the deadliest attacks attributed to Osama ben Laden's al-Qaeda network since September 11, 2001.

"We have no specific information to make an (operational) link between London and Sharm el-Sheikh," Sri Lankan Rohan Gunaratna, considered one of the leading experts on al-Qaeda, told AFP.

al-Qaeda assumed a global dimension immediately after September 11, and dispersed very significantly after the US intervention in Afghanistan aimed at striking at its roots, Gunaratna said, "and more than that, al-Qaeda endorsed so many other groups."

"There are cells all over the world," he said, adding, "some of those cells are operationally linked, but all are ideologically linked."

Magnus Ranstorp, head of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland, said it was impossible to have planned and carried out the Sharm el-Sheikh blasts in reaction even to the first explosions in London on July 7, let alone those of last Thursday.