The Egyptian government closed one of the more bizarre chapters in its battle with Islamist extremists yesterday when it executed two brothers for killing nine German tourists and their Egyptian driver in the capital last September.
Saber Farahat Abu el-Ela and his brother Mahmoud were hanged at dawn at the Istinaf prison, outside Cairo, bringing the number of those executed who were described as Islamists to 59 since 1992.
They had pleaded guilty to the firebomb attack on September 18th on a tour bus in front of Egypt's premier museum of antiquities, saying that they acted to avenge an Israeli woman's poster campaign that depicted the Prophet Muhammed as a pig.
Saber, a failed pop musician dubbed "the lunatic" by the Cairo media , was already notorious for having raked the lobby of a leading Cairo hotel with automatic gunfire while shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is Great") back in 1993.
He was declared insane and committed to a mental hospital but either escaped or was released some months before the September attack; he later claimed to have bribed the hospital's director to say he was insane in the first place. The latter was subsequently prosecuted for negligence.
The question of whether Saber was indeed a lunatic was hotly debated in the Egyptian press. He claimed to have acted alone on both occasions, and for the government it was certainly more convenient to portray him as unbalanced rather than admit that the Islamists which it claimed to have crushed were still able to mount such effective attacks.
Certainly Egypt's main Islamist group, the Gama'a al-Islamiya, seemed caught off guard by the attack, although it later hailed Saber and Mahmoud as holy warriors "sowing the seeds of holy war".
Saber himself only fuelled speculation about his sanity, supplying provocative sound-bites to reporters from his metal cage in the court-room. Among his comments were his regrets that there were no Jews among his victims and that Europe was "preparing a damaging war against Islam".
But the questions about where the so-called lunatic could have obtained the funds needed to bribe the hospital director and buy the weapons used in the attack, or how he convinced his brother to participate, were left unanswered when the authorities, presumably worried about the effect of the negative publicity on tourism in the wake of the attack, imposed a media ban on anything to do with the event.
Like other Islamists, Saber and Mahmoud, and their seven accomplices, were tried in a military court (the Egyptian government by-passed civilian courts with their lengthy proceedings and uncertain outcomes in such trials five years ago).
The trial was a raucous affair, with Saber and Mahmoud claiming they had named some of their co-defendants because they owed them money or had otherwise slighted them in the past.
All of the alleged accomplices protested their innocence and claimed to have been tortured by the police into naming others - a common complaint of those passing through Egypt's notorious police stations. Lawyers for the accused supported the torture allegations.
Nevertheless, six of the seven were sentenced to between one and 10 years in prison with hard labour.
But perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the entire case, apart from its clear illustration of how the authorities feel justified in trampling both free speech and their own justice system when it comes to Islamists, was the spectre of individuals such as Saber acting alone to defend their own version of Islam.
In the words of one of the trial lawyers, "Saber and those like him believe that they have a responsibility to defend their faith" in a new world order which "is targeting Islam and Muslims".
Less than a month after he said this a group of extremists, who may also have been acting alone, killed 58 tourists in the Nile resort of Luxor.