Egypt Pledges Five Years of Free Holidays to Hurghada Attack Victims

Two knife-wielding men have attacked a hotel in Egypt’s Red Sea resort city of Hurghada and injured three European tourists, only a day after two men attacked a hotel bus in the capital Cairo.

“The motive of the attack is unknown, and it is confirmed that one attacker is in custody and the other was killed by security forces”, a ministry statement said.

Police colonel Ali Ahmed Fahmy and conscript Ramadan al-Burhami were killed as they made their way to work in Giza’s Shabramant district, the Ministry of Interior said in a statement on Saturday.

The reports also add that they raised the IS flag.

The victims, identified as Renata and Wilhelm Weisslein, both 72, and Sammie Olovsson, 27, are all in stable condition.

Security sources had previously said one from Denmark, one from Germany and two tourists were injured.

Another attack against foreign tourists took place Thursday in Giza, in close proximity to the Egyptian pyramids, with no reported injuries.

The assailants arrived by sea to carry out the assault, the sources said.

Egypt has been battling an insurgency based in the northern Sinai peninsula that grew following the 2013 military overthrow of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi. “They don’t say give me your money”, Sammie commented to the newspaper about his assailants.

IS also claimed responsibility for downing a Russian passenger plane on 31 October after it took off from the airport of Sharm el-Sheikh, another Egyptian Red Sea resort, killing all 224 people on board. “I thought I would bleed to death”, he said.

Egypt’s police stressed that no guns or explosives were found on the attackers. Egypt’s tourism minister, Hisham Zazou, said the assailants appeared to have been acting alone, saying they were “not part of an organisation”. “We are facing the exact same threat in Paris, unfortunately in London, all over the world”, he said.

Since then, important tourist operators have eliminated packages to Sharm el-Sheikh and Hurghada, and Russian Federation itself cancelled all flights to and from Egypt. The authorities in Hurghada acted very quickly and very effectively to deal with the local agitators whose goal was to further harm the tourism sector which is so important to Egypt’s economy.

A member of hotel staff, reportedly speaking anonymously, said he had dragged a female tourist in the lobby while holding a knife to her neck when he was shot by a poice officer.