Security officials had initially said the attackers wounded two tourists, a Dane and a German, but such discrepancies are common in the immediate aftermath of terror attacks.
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Gunmen have shot dead two Egyptian police officers in the southern outskirts of the capital Cairo, the latest deadly attack on the country’s security forces.
“I told him to lie still”, Jan-Eric Olovsson said, recalling how his son lay in a pool of blood. Police said they were Arab-Israeli tourists, and the assailants had targeted policemen outside the hotel and not the tourists.
Tourism Minister Hisham Zazou was due to arrive in the resort today morning “to check on the wounded tourists”, the ministry said. “They took knives and they tried to get Sammie here”, he said, pointing to his chest.
One of the injured was from Denmark and the other from Germany, the sources said.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian branch of the jihadist Islamic State group on Thursday said it had bombed a pipeline that carries gas to Jordan and to a major industrial zone in north Sinai.
Egyptian security forces confronted two men wielding knives trying to escape the hotel, shooting both of them, according to a statement from the Egyptian Interior Ministry’s Facebook page.
He described having to watch his son lie in a pool of his own blood until he could safely run outside to get an ambulance.
“Over the coming days we will announce even greater security measures to safeguard all tourists visiting Egypt”, he said.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, which came a day after an ISIS-inspired attack on a hotel near the Giza Pyramids.
According to the BBC, authorities have gone to great lengths to secure Egypt’s Red Sea resorts ever since bombers attacked the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in 2005, which sits between the desert of the Sinai Peninsula and the Red Sea.
Egyptian security forces have been the target of attacks by armed groups since the January 2011 popular uprising that brought down former president Hosni Mubarak.
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A hotel worker in an Egyptian hotel that was attacked on Friday is disputing the government’s official account of the incident that has left an undetermined number of foreigners injured.
