The editorial finishes by taking an even stronger aim at Egypt’s government, saying that it is run by a “military elite”, and that the “last time their authority was challenged, they undertook a coup against an elected government”.
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Mexico also has demanded that Egypt compensate the victims. Amr Imam used the hashtag #عوض_الجيش_قتله (the army killed Awad), in reference to his colleague.
Egyptian security forces frequently target smugglers in the western desert, and in July 2014, gunmen armed with rocket-propelled grenades attacked a border guard post, killing 21 troops.
The place they chose for their picnic was a regular tourist stop, Nahla said later on television. “He was very badly wounded”.
Egyptian security forces bombed a group of Mexican tourists and their Egyptian guides around five times over a period of three hours, revealed survivor Susana Calderon who had been recovering in a Cairo hospital.
“I call on President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi to order an exceptional pension for the family of my brother”, his brother Aboul-Ela told Xinhua, hoping the Egyptian authorities will treat his deceased brother as the Mexican victims in terms of appreciation and compensation.
“The drug war in Mexico has killed tens of thousands of innocent people, a large portion of them law enforcement officials”, Shoukry wrote.
“President Pena Nieto expressed his deep dismay and sadness over the death of our citizens, as well as the pain and outrage that these unprecedented events have caused within Mexican society”, the statement said. “And then I heard nothing more of him”, she said, adding that she was told days later that he had died.
“There have been reports, many of them conflicting, regarding whether the tourist convoy had the necessary permits, whether it had taken a detour to a restricted area and whether the use of four-wheel drives instead of a tourist bus had increased the risk of mistaken identification”, the letter states.
The incident has proven embarrassing for security forces which regularly claim to have killed dozens of militants in airstrikes, tolls that are hard to independently verify.
The tour group had been travelling in a convoy of four 4x4s near the Bahariya oasis, a popular tourist location.
Egypt has been battling Islamist militants for years, with attacks escalating since the 2013 ousting of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.
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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.
