CAIRO - Egyptian police have arrested five Libyans alleged to be members of al-Qaida, intercepted two truckloads of arms from Libya and killed a Libyan suspected of involvement in the assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, adding new evidence that arms and extremists are leaching out of Libya into the wider region.
The flow of men and materiel across Libya's borders highlights the growing chaos and weak central authority afflicting the North African nation more than a year after dictator Moammar Gadhafi was toppled and killed in what was at the time the bloodiest of the Arab Spring uprisings.
The presence of alleged Libyan Islamists and smuggled weapons in Egypt underscored how the insecurity in Libya could be inflaming violence, political instability and extremism elsewhere in the region as the toppling of long-standing governments ended decades of harsh authoritarian rule.
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Libyan fighters and arms reportedly are bolstering rebel forces battling the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad.
Arms looted from Gadhafi's warehouses are believed to have played a major role in the takeover of northern Mali by al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.
The situation is being closely monitored in Washington because of fears that al-Qaida and other Islamist groups are gaining greater room in which to operate and spread their violent ideology in the wake of the upheaval.
Karim Ahmed Essam al Azizi died in a shootout with police that erupted when police officers tried to storm the apartment he had been renting in the Cairo suburb of Medinat Nasser for the past three months.
Azizi lobbed a bomb at the officers, but it bounced back into the apartment and exploded.
He survived the blast, opened fire and was killed when the officers fired back, the officials said.
When police entered Azizi's apartment they found his charred corpse. They also found 17 bombs, four rocket-propelled grenades, three automatic weapons and large quantities of ammunition.
Egyptian authorities did not disclose the reason they suspect Azizi of involvement in the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city, which killed the U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans.
The assault ignited an election-year controversy in the United States.
Republicans are accusing the Obama administration of stinting on security.
