A family souvenir of sentimental value unwittingly resulted in an international incident yesterday, the family of the man at the centre of the crisis claimed last night.
Fears of a terrorist attack were sparked at Cairo airport when it was discovered that Irish citizen and surgeon, Dr Waheed Mikhail, was carrying a gun in his luggage.
However, the truth was much less dramatic, his wife, Ms Stella Mikhail said from her Cork home last night.
Dr Mikhail was returning from Egypt after going through the personal effects of his late father, Prof Naguib Mikhail.
Prof Mikhail was an archaeologist and Egyptologist and had been working in the desert since the 1940s.
He had carried a gun to protect the artefacts as he slept in tombs during his excavations.
Egyptian artefacts were regularly looted before stricter laws were introduced in more recent years.
Dr Mikhail divided up the father's belongings with his sister in Egypt and agreed to keep the gun.
He was carrying the licence with the gun when the alarm was raised at Cairo airport. The first Ms Mikhail heard of the incident was when he called her at 6 a.m. yesterday morning, after he had been detained. While news agencies reported that security officers had allegedly found as many as 17 bullets with the gun, Ms Mikhail said she did not believe the gun contained ammunition.
Ms Mikhail said her husband had been cleared of all suspicion and released at about 2.30 p.m. yesterday.
Had the authorities any doubt about his innocence, this would not have happened, she said.
She added that her husband was greatly upset by the incident and needed time to recover before he returned home.
Mr Mikhail is a Coptic-Christian but his wife said the Irish media was portraying him as some sort of Muslim terrorist yesterday.
"It's really quite upsetting to hear these reports and we would prefer the truth to be known," she said. "It was very depressing to hear all these allegations. He is totally innocent."
She said did not know if her husband would be arriving home with the now infamous gun.
"I have no idea what happened to the gun. To be honest, all I cared about was that he had been released," she said.
