Egyptian police: Attempt to smuggle Jewish property papers out of Egypt

Ever since last month's conference on Jewish refugees from Arab lands conference at the UN, Egypt has been nervously reporting about demands by Jews to gain restitution for property that they lost when they were forced to flee Egypt.

Now, on Friday:

Cairo police seized 13 parcels in large suitcases in Nasr City containing private books and papers of Jews in Egypt. These parcels were intended to be sent out of the country, where investigations revealed that they were en route to Jordan.

The newspaper Al-Ahram said it is likely that these files and papers were from the government, and intense efforts to catch the owner of these shipments are underway, after it was discovered the existence of the name of an unknown foreign woman on the parcels.

...These papers and books are very old, and contain information about the Jews in Egypt.

Investigations have revealed that these packages would go out of the country on behalf of a foreign woman to Jordan and from there to Israel, and then used in the prosecution of Egypt...

I asked a friend who is an expert in such matters whether this makes sense, and the respose was "It seems that the Egyptians are running scared about this whole Israeli campaign to recover Jewish assets. They are quite capable of framing a woman in order to try and scare off any Jews who might want to take the law into their own hands. And it’s a warning to any Egyptian who might be thinking of helping Israel gather information!"

The story seems fishy to me as well. It seems that if you wanted to smuggle papers from Egypt to Israel, Jordan would not be the preferred route - a European country would make a lot more sense. Chances are they found a lot of documents, a minority of which had something to do with Jews, and their imaginations took over from there.