Doubts swirl after Egypt explains airstrike that killed tourists
Military helicopter crew mistook Mexican visitors for terrorists, officials say
CAIRO— The mistaken airstrike by the Egyptian military that killed a dozen people on a Mexican tourist trip in the Western Desert hit at a picnic in the middle of the day, witnesses said Monday, raising new questions about both the extent of the error and the official explanations. The convoy of four SUVs was about three hours southwest of Cairo on a typical tourist trip through the White Desert, an otherworldly area of chalk rocks, around midday Sunday when a dia- betic passenger complained she needed to eat, according to a tour guide official, witnesses and others briefed on the events.
So, with the blessing of their police escort and the added security of an Apache military helicopter buzzing on the horizon, the Egyptian guide and his four drivers pulled about a kilometer off the road to prepare a meal.
It was then that the helicopter opened fire, killing at least a dozen people — including at least two visiting Mexicans — while wounding a tourist policeman and at least 10 others. Some were gunned down as they tried to flee toward the top of a nearby sand dune, said Essam Monem, a local resident who arrived that night and saw the bodies in the sand.
The helicopter crew had mistaken the tourist picnic for a camp of Islamist militants operating in the area, the Interior Ministry said in a statement early Monday. But the accident has nonetheless killed more tourists than any terrorist attack in recent years.
Analysts say it has threatened to do new damage to Egypt’s already crippled tourist industry by raising questions about both the competence of the security forces and the prevalence of the militants they were attempting to hunt.
“What we saw was not just the lack of training of the military forces but also their desperation,” said Mokhtar Awad, a researcher at the Center for American Progress who tracks Egyptian militant groups, noting that Islamic State militants in the area had also released photographs Sunday that appeared to show they had beaten back an army unit in battle earlier the same day.
“It tells you how chaotic the situation is,” he said, “if they feel so desperate to put an end to this that they end up taking out what we gather is the first thing they see.”
Initial reports Sunday night from Egyptian security officials had said that the error took place late at night, when mistaking tourists for militants might be less hard to imagine.
In its statement Monday, the Interior Ministry sought instead to blame the tour guides, suggesting the convoy had entered a “banned area” without permission.
A Mexican tourist group “was present in the same banned area” as a group of “terrorist elements” that the military and police forces had been chasing, the ministry’s statement said.
But the official union of tour guides and friends of the trip’s leader, who was killed in the attack, circulated photographs of the convoy’s official permit on the Internet.