Two tourists, 5 police killed in attacks in Egypt
CAIRO — Two German female tourists were stabbed to death while four other foreigners were wounded in an attack at a hotel in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Hurghada, an Egyptian security official said.
The assault on Friday came just hours after a shooting near some of Egypt’s most famous pyramids outside of Cairo killed five policemen.
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.
In the attack on the police, shooters riding on a motorcycle opened fire on a security vehicle patrolling a Giza village, next to some of Egypt’s oldest pyramids outside the capital, Cairo, killing the five officers, 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 nearweekly attacks by suspected Islamic militants after a blitz attack left 23 troops dead in northern Sinai a week ago.
Egypt has been under a months-long state of emergency following a series of deadly church bombings in the spring that killed scores of Christians.
The village of Abusir in Badrashin, where the 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.
According to the ministry, the militants sprayed the officer’s vehicle with machine-gun fire and fled the scene after one officer returned gunfire. However, a video appears to show the attackers faced no resistance. It shows them seizing the officer’s weapons and radios and setting fire to the bodies after the shooting.