Scary find in the Egyptian desert!
In the Quattara Depression, two hours south of the small town of El Alamein, Bedouins have made a spectacular discovery. By chance they came across the skeletons of four Wehrmacht soldiers. The Germans were part of the Africa campaign almost 80 years ago.
Ahmed Sedky from the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge e. V.: “A shepherd wanted to make tea and dug in the sand to build a small fireplace. Then he came across human bones.” The Bedouin informed an employee of the Volksbund, who continued to search at the site.
Sedky continued: “He found a medal and the remains of a uniform with buttons. And we saw from the buttons that it was a German soldier.”
The Volksbund commissioner and his colleagues contacted the police, who ensured that it was actually a war casualty – not a missing person or a victim of a crime. The dead man was buried under a piece of rock, so that a small mound had formed.
Sedky: “On the way there, I noticed a number of small bumps like this, so I sent an employee with a metal detector to look for them. He found the bones of three other men. One was badly burned, as if hit by a bomb. The other two were properly buried and had their dog tags with them.”
In Egypt it is unusual to move the dead. The “defamation of death” carries a three-year prison term. With the approval of the public prosecutor, the Volksbund team was allowed to recover the bones and take them to the El Alamein war cemetery. They will be buried there in October.