  The gamma-ray burst (GRB) 070201 was a bright short-duration hard-spectrum
GRB detected by the Inter-Planetary Network (IPN). Its error quadrilateral,
which has an area of 0.124 sq. deg, intersects some prominent spiral arms of
the nearby M31 (Andromeda) galaxy. Given the properties of this GRB, along with
the fact that LIGO data argues against a compact binary merger origin in M31,
this GRB is an excellent candidate for an extragalactic Soft Gamma-ray Repeater
(SGR) giant flare, with energy of 1.4x10^45 erg. Analysis of ROTSE-IIIb visible
light observations of M31, taken 10.6 hours after the burst and covering 42% of
the GRB error region, did not reveal any optical transient down to a limiting
magnitude of 17.1. We inspected archival and proprietary XMM-Newton X-ray
observations of the intersection of the GRB error quadrilateral and M31,
obtained about four weeks prior to the outburst, in order to look for periodic
variable X-ray sources. No SGR or Anomalous X-ray Pulsar (AXP) candidates
(periods in range 1 to 20 s) were detected. We discuss the possibility of
detecting extragalactic SGRs/AXPs by identifying their periodic X-ray light
curves. Our simulations suggest that the probability of detecting the periodic
X-ray signal of one of the known Galactic SGRs/AXPs, if placed in M31, is about
10% (50%), using 50 ks (2 Ms) XMM-Newton exposures.
