South Korean tourists on bus hit by bomb in Egypt
Print Edition
A BOMB tore through a bus carrying South Korean tourists near an Egyptian border crossing with Israel yesterday, killing at least four people and wounding 13 others.
The bomb went off in the front section of the bus carrying the tourists at Taba border crossing with Israel in south Sinai, the interior ministry said, adding that one of those killed was the Egyptian driver.
The bomb peeled off the front of the yellow bus and tore out parts of the roof.
A witness who had been waiting for a bus nearby described scenes of horror as the bomb ripped through the vehicle.
“There were body parts and corpses. I saw the corpse of a man who appeared to be Korean, with a leg missing,” said the witness.
The interior ministry said the tourists had set off from Cairo and were waiting at the crossing to enter Israel.
A spokesman for the Israel Airports Authority said that the Taba crossing had been closed in the wake of the blast. No one immediately claimed responsibility.
Scores of policemen and soldiers have been killed in bombings in Sinai and the Nile Delta, but yesterday’s attack was the first targeting tourists since Islamist President Mohamed Morsi was ousted in July last year.
The unrest has hit tourism, a vital earner in Egypt, which has been targeted sporadically by militants over the past two decades.
The government’s census agency said the number of tourists was down in December 2013 by almost 31 percent compared with the same month in 2012.
The bombing came as a court in Cairo opened the trial of Morsi and 35 co-defendants on charges of espionage and collusion with militants to carry out attacks in Egypt.
The military-installed government has accused Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood of masterminding the attacks that have also targeted police headquarters in Cairo.
The Brotherhood, now deemed a terrorist group, denies involvement in the bombings.
The deadliest attacks have been claimed by the Sinai-based Ansar Beit al-Maqdis group, whose leadership is drawn from militant Bedouin who want an Islamist state in the peninsula.
The group also took responsibility for downing a military helicopter in Sinai on January 25 using a heat-seeking shoulder-fired missile.
That attack prompted concerns militants could use such weapons to target commercial flights to resorts in south Sinai.
Between 2004 and 2006, scores of Egyptians and foreign tourists were killed in a spate of bombings in resorts in south Sinai.
In 1997, Islamist militants massacred dozens of tourists in a temple in the southern city of Luxor.
In Cairo, a French tourist was killed in a 2009 bombing at the Khan al-Khalil bazaar, which police at the time blamed on militants from the neighboring Palestinian Gaza Strip.
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