Two suspected militants stabbed and wounded three foreign tourists—two Austrians and a Swede—at a hotel in Egypt’s Red Sea resort city of Hurghada on Friday, the Interior Ministry said.
Security forces opened fire at the two assailants, killing one and seriously wounding the other, according to a ministry statement. The wounded attacker was arrested, according to security officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
It is the second attack on a hotel frequented by foreign tourists in Egypt in as many days, an ominous development for the country’s already battered tourism industry, AP reported.
The attacks came less than three months after a Russian airliner was downed over the Sinai Peninsula shortly after it took off from Sharm el-Sheikh, another popular Red Sea resort in Egypt. All 224 people on board, most of them Russian, were killed.
The local affiliate of the extremist Islamic State group claimed responsibility for downing the aircraft, saying it had planted a bomb aboard.
The Interior Ministry, which is in charge of police, said two men armed with knives had entered the restaurant at the front of the seaside, four-star Bella Vista Hotel and attacked the tourists.
The ministry identified the slain attacker as 21-year-old Mohammed Hassan Mohammed Mahfouz, a student from Cairo’s neighborhood of Giza. Both attackers, it said, carried knives and pellet guns.
All three wounded tourists were taken to hospital, where one was treated and discharged, the statement said. There was no word in the statement on the condition of the other two, but Health Ministry spokesman Khaled Megahed described the condition of the three as “not serious”.
A member of the hotel’s management staff who witnessed the incident said the attackers sneaked into the Bella Vista from a hotel next door, accessing the facility from the beach.
The slain attacker, he said, appeared to want to take a female tourist hostage, dragging her into the hotel’s lobby with his knife held against her neck when he was shot dead by a policeman.
The witness spoke on condition of anonymity in line with the hotel’s management regulations.
The attack came just hours after the local IS affiliate claimed an attack a day earlier on a hotel in Cairo near the Giza Pyramids. No one was hurt in the Thursday attack in which a group of over a dozen men fired flares and birdshot at a security post outside the hotel where Arab Israeli tourists were staying.
Egypt has been battling an insurgency by militants led by the local IS affiliate. The insurgency has been centered at the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula but has frequently spilled over into the mainland since the ouster in 2013 of president Mohammed Morsi.
