Egyptian security forces accidentally kill 12 tourists and guides
At least two Mexicans and 10 others have died after their vehicles
were accidentally attacked by Egyptian security forces in the country’s
western desert.
The Egyptian interior ministry said a joint policy and military force
was “chasing terrorist elements” in the area when it “accidentally
engaged four four-wheel drives belonging to a Mexican tourist group”.
It said 12 had been killed and 10 injured in the shooting, understood
to have taken place at the Bahariya oasis around 4pm on Sunday, local
time.
Mexico’s foreign ministry said two of the victims and at least five
of the injured were Mexican nationals, but was “confirming the
identities of other possible victims”.
“Mexico condemns these acts against our citizens and has called on the government of Egypt for a thorough investigation of what happened,” Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, said in a statement on social media.
An Egyptian human rights lawyer, Amr Imam, told the Guardian that one
his relatives, Awad Fathi, was among six Egyptians killed in the
convoy.
He said Fathi, 37, was a manager and tour guide operator at the Kisr
al-Buwati Hotel in the Bahariya oasis, a popular tourist stop around
370km south of Cairo.
A spokesman for the Egyptian tourism ministry said the tour group did
not have the correct permits to be in the area and that their presence
was “illegal”.
“A working group has been formed to examine the causes and
circumstances of the incident as well as the justification for the
presence of a tourist group in a region to which access is prohibited,”
the interior ministry said in a statement.
The Mexican government said the injured had been taken to
Dar-el-Fouad hospital in Giza, south-west of central Cairo, where they
were being attended to by consular staff.
Advertisement
Egypt is battling an insurgency that gained pace after the
military ousted the Islamist president Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim
Brotherhood in mid-2013 after mass protests against his rule. The insurgency, mounted by Islamic State’s Egyptian affiliate, has killed hundreds of soldiers and police and has started to attack western targets.
Earlier on Sunday Islamic State released a statement carried by its
supporters on Twitter saying it had repelled an attack by the Egyptian
military in the Western desert, a recent development for the insurgency
that had been largely based in the Sinai peninsula with occasional
attacks taking place in Cairo and other cities.
Egypt’s economy is traditionally driven by tourism but arrivals have
plummeted as the country tries to recover from years of political and
economic chaos.
About 10 million tourists visited in 2014, down sharply from a 2010
figure of almost 15 million people who visited the country with its
archaeological sites and Red Sea resorts.
No comments:
Post a Comment