Tourists stabbed at Egypt Red Sea resort

Attack comes hours after police officers were killed in shootout near Cairo

CAIRO— Two German female tourists were stabbed to death while four other foreigners were wounded in an attack Friday at a hotel in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Hurghada, an Egyptian security official said.

The assault came just hours after a shooting, near some of Egypt’s most famous pyramids outside of Cairo, killed five police officers.

The motive behind the stabbing was unclear and the Interior Ministry said the attacker at the Red Sea resort was arrested immediately.

A security official said the attacker, a man in his 20s dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, wielded a knife and intentionally sought to attack foreigners.

“Stay away, I don’t want Egyptians,” the assailant had said in Arabic during the attack, according to the official.

Without taking any blame for what appears to be a major security breach, the Interior Ministry said the attacker had sneaked into the hotel by swimming from a nearby beach.

In the killings of the five police officers outside of Cairo, no group claimed responsibility for the attack, but it bore the hallmarks of a smaller Islamic militant group known as Hasm that has been behind similar shootings in recent months.

Friday’s attacks are likely to further impact Egypt’s deeply struggling tourism industry — a pillar of the country’s economy that employs millions of people. The industry has suffered from political instability and a fragile security situation since the 2011 Arab Spring uprising.

The attacker in Hurghada, one of Egypt’s most popular beach resorts and diving centres, stabbed the tourists in the face, neck and feet, according to the security official.

Two German tourists died of their wounds while four tourists were wounded, including citizens of Ukraine and the Czech Republic, the official told The Associated Press.

Earlier, another official said that Ukrainians were killed and that the wounded included Serbian and Polish tourists. But in Belgrade, Serbia’s foreign ministry said no Serbian citizens were among the wounded. Later, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin tweeted that no Ukrainian citizens were among the victims in the Hurghada attack.

In Germany, the foreign ministry said that it “cannot rule out” that German citizens were among the victims, but stressed that it doesn’t yet have that information. The German Embassy in Cairo is in close contact with Egyptian authorities to clear that up, it added.

An emergency doctor at the al-Salam hospital in Hurghada declined to answer questions, only confirming the wounded tourists were brought there. Both the security official and the doctor spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media.

The contradictory information reflected the confusion in the immediate aftermath of the attack involving foreigners in one of Egypt’s most popular resorts.

In the attack on the officers, gun- men riding on a motorcycle opened fire on a security vehicle patrolling a Giza village, the Interior Ministry and officials said.

The deadly shooting — on the Muslim weekend in Egypt, when traffic is slower — heightened fears of what has become near-weekly attacks by suspected Islamic militants after a blitz attack left 23 troops dead in northern Sinai a week ago.

Egypt has been under a monthslong state of emergency following a series of deadly church bombings in the spring that killed Christians.

The village of Abusir in Badrashin, where the police officers were killed, is part of Greater Cairo. The officers were part of the force tasked to guard the district of Saqqara, one of Egypt’s most popular tourist sites and host to a collection of temples, tombs and funerary complexes.