Mexican tourists describe repeated Egyptian airstrikes on desert convoy

Mexico will wait for the results of an Egyptian government investigation into the mistaken attack by security forces that killed eight Mexican tourists before determining what action to take, the foreign minister said on Wednesday.

“The joint forces of the police and the army, which were chasing terrorists in the Western Desert, opened fire by mistake on four pickups transporting Mexican tourists”, said in a statement the Egyptian Ministry of Interior on the night of Sunday to Monday.

She visited injured survivors in a Cairo hospital before meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Mexico’s government demanded on Thursday that Egypt compensate tourists mistakenly attacked by Egyptian security forces at the weekend in a deadly incident that outraged the Latin American nation.

Foreign Relations Secretary Claudia Ruiz Massieu said her office is trying to speed up the repatriation of the victims’ bodies.

With six Mexicans wounded, that would at least leave five unaccounted for, as reports vary on whether there were 14 or 15 tourists in the group. She said Rafael had also been to Egypt before.

A Mexican tourist who survived an airstrike by Egyptian security forces has described how her tour group was bombed for three hours. “They were not supposed to be there”, she said, without providing further information about the incident. “God wanted me to know what real fear feels like”.

“Mexico condemns these incidents against our citizens”, Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto wrote on his Twitter account in response to the accident, calling Egypt for “a thorough investigation of what happened”.

Egyptian security forces regularly claim to have killed dozens of militants in air strikes, though the tolls are hard to independently verify.

“They had arranged a number of trips over the space of two weeks – and for this objective they had all the necessary permits”.

A third, when asked about the circumstances of the incident, declined to comment.

The place they chose for their picnic was a regular tourist stop, Nahla said.

Egypt has been battling Islamist militants for years, with attacks escalating since the 2013 ousting of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

The Western Desert is popular with tour groups, but is also a militant hideout, with Western embassies warning against non-essential travel there.

Last month, Egypt’s branch of the Islamic State group, which calls itself Sinai Province, beheaded a Croatian oil worker, who was abducted near Cairo, at the edge of the Western Desert.