Terrorists attack foreign tourists in Egypt hotel

Egyptian officials have reported that two armed assailants attacked a hotel in the Egyptian Red Sea resort town of Hurghada on Friday, stabbing and wounding three foreign tourists.

Security forces apprehended one person who was hiding behind the hotel the ministry said.

Egyptian newspaper Al-Masri Al-Youm (Egypt Today) quoted the commander of police in the Giza governorate southwest of Cairo as saying that two gunmen on a motorcylce had opened fire on the tourists as they left their hotel to board a bus.

A tourist agent whose works nearby told AFP that police evacuated the hotel while bomb disposal experts entered the building to check for any explosives.

Egypt has witnessed a growing wave of anti-security attacks in revenge for the crackdown on Islamists after the army-led ouster of President Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

Security forces have cordoned off the area and are now investigating the incident.

He died at the scene but the second man was wounded and detained at the four-star Red Sea resort.

Security officials had initially said the attackers wounded two tourists, a Dane and a German, but such discrepancies are common in the immediate aftermath of terror attacks.

Some extremists in Sinai have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group and claimed the downing of a Russian airliner that killed 224 people there past year.

Egypt was able to deal swiftly and effectively with this latest attack in Hurghada but the authorities will want to establish where it was launched from and what further precautions they now need to take.

Cairo says it has found no evidence of terrorism in the crash. 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.