Islamic Extremists Declaring War on Egypt’s Tourist Industry : Terrorism: It is the country’s No. 1 moneymaker. But beer-guzzling, scantily clad foreigners irritate fundamentalists.

The passengers of the luxury river cruiser called the Nile Elite were just sitting down to lunch when a series of loud cracks rang out from the west bank of the Nile. Many ran to windows, eager to see what sounded like a traditional celebration on shore.

What they saw were four men with scarves wrapped around their faces, each of them pointing automatic rifles at the ship. The passengers screamed and dived for cover. The cook and a tour guide collapsed with bullets in their legs. The ship manager’s office was badly shot up. Twelve windows elsewhere on the vessel were broken. Some of the bullets pierced the ship’s metal hull.

“I was very sure this was no celebration. I cried very loudly, ‘Everybody on the floor, at once!’ ” said the manager, Said Batouty. “Imagine, 140 Germans on board. It could have been a complete disaster. In a 10-year career, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

But it wasn’t to be the end of the attacks. On Wednesday afternoon, gunmen hiding in a farm field opened fire on a small tour bus in southern Egypt, killing a British tourist and wounding two others. An Islamic fundamentalist group boldly claimed responsibility for the attack.

After months of escalating clashes with police, Islamic extremists have moved against Egypt’s tourist industry, a $3-billion-a-year bonanza that is the country’s biggest money earner and, for religious conservatives, the irritating source of waves of beer-guzzling, immodestly clad foreigners.

“Tourism is our second target, after high-level political leaders, in the bid to implement Islamic law in Egypt,” the outlawed fundamentalist group Gamaa al Islamiya said in a statement Thursday acknowledging the attack on the British tourists. A caller to a foreign news agency said the shooting was a response to “torture, repeated detention and prevention of the call to God.”

Investigators said at least three gunmen fired 90 bullets at the tourist minibus, which was carrying nine foreigners on a jaunt past the historic temples and monuments that dot the southern Egyptian countryside.

The attack was the ninth and most serious this year against foreign tourists in Egypt, but Islamic extremists have been escalating their violence dramatically in the past few weeks.

Just days after the attack on the Nile Elite early this month, a suspected Islamic activist was blown up on a passenger train in the fundamentalist stronghold of Dairut when, authorities say, he attempted to hurl a bomb out of the train window onto a crowded station platform. Three others were killed and 10 injured in the blast, all of them Egyptians.

Earlier in the season, young men tossed firecrackers at tourists attending a sound and light show at Karnak Temple in Luxor, and homemade explosives were thrown onto a crowded bus full of French visitors near the upper Egyptian town of Qena in August. A French tourist was struck on the head with a metal pipe outside the Egyptian museum in Cairo last month.

The most recent attacks were preceded by a warning from the Gamaa al Islamiya that tourists could be injured in the cross-fire between Islamic extremists and Egyptian security forces. In a meeting with a small group of reporters in Cairo on Sept. 30, a Gamaa spokesman said that while tourists are not a target of the extremists, the Islamic groups in Egypt are aggrieved by their treatment at the hands of the authorities.

“The ruling regime has started a campaign to close mosques, prevent meetings, stop Friday prayers, arrest Muslim young men and take their relatives hostage . . . while it provides protection, luxury and facilities for people called tourists,” said the spokesman, quoted by the British news agency Reuters.

“Tourists are having sex in the streets and parks of Luxor and drinking alcohol. . . . As a Muslim, I have to defend my land, my mosque and my preaching, and to do that I have to stop the debaucheries and provocations.”

A few weeks earlier, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad, the most militant of the Muslim groups under the umbrella of Gamaa al Islamiya, telephoned the British Broadcasting Corp. in Cairo and warned that “the security of tourism is tied to our security in spreading the message of Islam.”

Overcoming a slump in tourism caused by the Persian Gulf War, Egypt lured back 3 million tourists in the fiscal year ending June 30 and boosted tourism revenues past those of oil, the earnings of Egyptian workers overseas and the Suez Canal. So tourism officials today are scrambling to contain the damage.

“We all condemn the two incidents of the boat and the train, and let me tell you these two incidents made the (outrage) of all the community of Egypt decisive. We are a people against bloodshed,” said Sayed Moussa, chairman of the Egyptian General Authority for the Promotion of Tourism.

In Dairut, the scene of the attack on the British tourists, police and paramilitary units set up three checkpoints, searching cars and verifying identity cards. A curfew blocked travel in and out of the town.

Police boat patrols on the Nile have been stepped up, and the park benches of Luxor, home of two ancient Egyptian temples and the tombs of the pharaohs, are filled with plainclothes police. Often, men in the regal robes and turbans of traditional Upper Egyptians are seen with police walkie-talkies poking out of their pockets.

On the streets of Luxor, which depends on tourists for its livelihood, there was anger over the attacks.

“Tourists are our major income here. We have foreigners walking up and down this road every day and night,” said the proprietor of a cafe frequented by locals on Luxor’s West Bank. “We do not tolerate anyone messing with our bread and soul.”

But Islamic groups have for years criticized the celebration of Egypt’s Pharaonic monuments, which they regard as pagan temples, and the bikini-clad tourists of Egypt’s Red Sea resorts. The short shorts and halter tops of foreigners on the streets of Luxor and Cairo often draw hostile stares from bearded fundamentalists.

One of Egypt’s leading Islamic writers, Adel Hussein, was critical recently of a huge convention of 5,000 American travel agents held in Cairo, billed by the local press as “the biggest boost ever to Egyptian tourism” and an event Egyptian officials hope will boost American tourism in Egypt by up to 30%. (Last year, 90,642 Americans visited Egypt, only about 4% of Egypt’s tourist total.)

Hussein, writing in the newspaper Al Shaab, said that dependence on tourism, like reliance on Suez Canal revenues, oil, foreign aid and remittances from Egyptians working abroad, leaves Egypt dangerously dependent on the largess of the West.

“The expansion in tourist activity at the expense of industrial and agricultural production results in deforming a large portion of the labor force, turning workers from producers into servants, begging for tips,” Hussein said.

“In hotel rooms, ballrooms and night clubs, the immoral acts of lewdness and gambling are known. In remote areas, there are nudist and semi-nudist colonies. Egyptians are serving at all these sites,” he said. “A nation that depends in its material earnings on this kind of dirty money is certainly a doomed one.”

It is hard to find an Egyptian who agrees. In any case, officials here say, tourists are probably safer in Luxor than in New York.

“We consider these small, trifling matters,” said Luxor’s mayor, Mohammed Ezzat Sayed. “No one is seriously hurt, and it is one or two accidents. Compare this with what happens always in any place outside Egypt. When I was in New York with my bag, I can’t leave it for one second. We are the most secure country in the world.”