Three tourists – two Austrians and a Swede – were wounded on Friday afternoon when two men armed with knives launched an assault on the Bella Vista hotel in Hurghada.
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Security forces are still combing the area for possible.
“Unknown assailants infiltrated into the hotel through the restaurant that faces the street and threatened clients with knives”, an interior ministry statement said. There was no immediate word on the condition of the two wounded tourists.
One traffic police officer and a soldier were killed on Saturday morning in the attack targeted their vehicle in Giza on the outskirts of capital Cairo, State-run MENA news agency reported.
Sam Eric, a tourist from Sweden who was injured in an attack at a hotel, talks to media from a bed at Nile Hospital in the Red Sea resort of Hurghada on January 9, 2016.
Meanwhile, two policemen were killed on the way to work in an attack in the Giza district of Cairo.
The extremist group’s Egypt affiliate is waging an insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula, and dealt a body blow to the country’s tourism industry by claiming to have downed the Russian airliner in October, killing all the holidaymakers on board.
Managers of the Egyptian hotel where three tourists were stabbed have claimed that “drugged young men” were responsible and called rumours of an Isis-inspired terror attack “nonsense and c**p”.
A security official said about 40 Arab Israelis were inside waiting to board a bus when the attack occurred.
Friday’s attack came just hours after the local Islamic State affiliate claimed responsibility for a shooting attack on a tourist bus outside a hotel near Egypt’s famous Giza pyramids the previous day. I conveyed my deepest regrets for what they went through last night.
Two armed assailants were involved in the attack at the beachside Bella Vista hotel in Hurghada.
Both were equipped with knives and reports say the IS flag was lifted by them.
He said: “One of the reasons why the British Foreign Office has not advised against travel to the Red Sea resorts is because of the fact that Egyptians do have very high levels of security”.
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Revenue from tourism is crucial for the Egyptian economy, but the sector has been hit hard by such attacks. Attacks on security forces there have significantly escalated after the military overthrew Islamist President Mohammed Morsi in 2013.
