Gunmen Slay 18 Greek Tourists at Hotel in Egypt

In the worst attack on foreigners in four years of Islamic revolt in Egypt, suspected Muslim extremists screaming “God is great!” opened fire Thursday on a crowd of elderly Greek religious pilgrims at a hotel outside Cairo.

Eighteen of the pilgrims were killed by the automatic-weapons fire, and 16 others and an Egyptian taxi driver were wounded in the early morning attack at the Europa Hotel, less than a mile from the Great Pyramids, the government said.

The killers escaped.

Some Egyptian newspapers in early editions today said the tourists were mistaken for Israelis. But to analysts, the attack seemed a testimony to Islamic unrest within Egypt rather than a spillover from the explosive flux in Lebanon and Israel.

Egyptian officials blamed the attack on Muslim fundamentalists who have made foreign tourists prime targets in their battle to replace the secular Egyptian government with strict Islamic rule.

The attack came just after 7 a.m. Thursday on busy Pyramids Road in Giza. Dozens of religious pilgrims, many of them gray-haired men and women who spoke only Greek, were filing into buses outside the eight-story hotel after breakfast.

The group, which had arrived in Cairo from Israel after touring the Holy Land, was en route to Alexandria for an audience with Orthodox Patriarch Parthenios III.

Witnesses said four gunmen in black leather jackets and carrying automatic weapons spilled out of a minivan and, screaming and shooting, ran for the hotel. “God is great!” one witness said they shouted.

“We saw people dying in front of us,” tourist Angela Housea told a Greek reporter in Athens by phone. “I want to get out of this country immediately. We are all in our rooms. It’s terrifying.”

Another tourist, Vassilis Bikas, told reporters that there would have been more casualties if all of the tourists had been on their buses, but many were still having breakfast.

“It was horrible. The ambulances were late. The gunmen opened fire and then fled. People were crying for help. There were pools of blood everywhere,” Bikas said.

Witnesses said Egyptian passersby comforted the wounded until help arrived.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack from among the more than 40 underground Muslim extremist groups.

Since violence flared in 1992, more than 900 people have died; the vast majority have been zealots and police who are at once their quarry and their hunters. Attacks on foreigners draw wide attention outside Egypt, but fewer than 10 tourists had died before Thursday’s assault.

“This is a terrible attack. It is the worst shooting that we have had,” Interior Ministry spokesman Mahmoud Fishawy said.

Analysts said the attack bore the trademark of the largest of the extremist bands, Gamaa al Islamiya, which claimed responsibility for a Dec. 27, 1993, attack on tourists in Cairo. Gunmen attacking a tour bus with explosives and guns wounded eight Austrian tourists and eight Egyptian passersby that day.

“Perhaps most significant about Thursday’s attack was where it took place,” said Ibrahim Karawan, a Middle East specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “Extremist violence has been most active lately in Upper Egypt. Cairo has been insulated.”

Planners of the attack wanted to show the limit of the government’s ability to prevent attacks in the Cairo area, Karawan said, and were probably also acting against rebounding tourism, a pillar of the Egyptian economy.

“The message in selecting a target near the pyramids is to scare tourists and to damage the economy, with the hope there will be political repercussions,” Karawan said.

Many of the victims of the attack hailed from the northern Greek city of Salonika. In all, there were 88 tourists on five separate tours, said tour leader Michael Zachariades.

“Security in Israel was very tight, but we didn’t expect anything like this here,” Zachariades said. The pilgrims had visited holy sites in Jerusalem and monasteries in Egypt.

They had been scheduled to return to Greece on Saturday. But two Greek airlines, as well as two Greek military planes, today began ferrying survivors and victims back to Athens.

Traveling with the Greeks were a number of Australians of Greek descent. None of them was injured.

“We condemn this terrorist act and express our revulsion over such actions that lead to the loss of so many lives,” a Greek government spokesman said.