The Mexican Foreign Ministry has so far confirmed the deaths of at least two of its citizens, stating that the ambassador had been informed of the incident by the tourism company, Windows of Egypt.
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But they have not offered a full account of Sunday’s incident, in which another 10 people were wounded.
A statement from the Egyptian interior ministry said the police and military operation was “chasing terrorist elements” in the area when it “accidentally engaged four four-wheel drives belonging to a Mexican tourist group”.
Mexico’s government said Monday that it presented Egypt with a diplomatic note protesting the killings of Mexican tourists by the security forces in an airstrike during a counterterrorism operation in the desert near Cairo and demanded an “expedited, exhaustive and far-ranging investigation” of the incident.
Ruiz Massieu said Mexico’s ambassador in Cairo was at the hospital where six other Mexican nationals were being treated for injuries. The episode happened around midnight, security officials said. “He’s done this tour for many years”, Bejarano said.
According to the lawyer, eyewitnesses said the convoy was attacked by an Apache helicopter, which was most likely given to the Egyptian security forces from military aid packages with the U.S.
The tour group had reportedly stopped its vehicles to prepare lunch, but Egyptian military helicopters mistakened the camp site for an Islamic militant dwelling.
After the military overthrew former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, Cairo has been struggling to quell a Muslim extremist insurgency, which is focused mainly in their primary holdout in the country’s east, the Sinai Peninsula.
She called it “a bad mistake” for them to have been traveling in the area. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry personnel had added that the identity of the victims is still being ascertained, and they will soon attempt to establish contact with the victims’ next of kin. That’s unlikely, of course, since the Egyptian junta maintains they did nothing wrong, and that if the tourists didn’t want to get “dealt with” they shouldn’t have been barbecuing on top of a sand dune.
A police source said special forces were on Sunday carrying out an operation involving air support about 150 kilometres west of Bahariya.
Mexico’s El Universal explained the discrepancy in the death toll of the Mexican tourists in the attack saying that the Egyptian government had been including the tour guides in the body count.
Education Images via Getty Images Rock formations near the Farafra oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert.
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Egypt’s Tourism Ministry, for its part, said the tourists had been in an off-limit area and had been using unlicensed vehicles for a safari expedition that had not been approved by the local authorities. Arms and insurgents traverse the long and remote desert border between Egypt and Libya, authorities say.
