10 Die in Attack on Tourists Near Cairo Museum

CAIRO —  Armed men shouting “God is greater!” firebombed and shot into a crowded tour bus in the heart of this city Thursday, setting off a conflagration and gun battle that killed nine German tourists and their Egyptian driver.

It was the worst assault on tourists in Cairo in 17 months. The attackers brazenly struck at midday in the busiest part of downtown: Tahrir Square, home to the Egyptian Museum, a world-famous center for Pharaonic antiquities, including the caskets of ancient rulers and King Tut’s gold.

Most people’s suspicions immediately focused on Egypt’s violent religious extremists, who have repeatedly targeted tourists in their six-year campaign to transform the country into an Islamic state.

But the government, mindful of the possible consequences to Egypt’s lucrative tourism industry, said the crime was the act of “a mentally disturbed person that could happen any time, anywhere.”

According to police, one of three suspects arrested after the attack is a deranged former nightclub singer who in 1993 went on a shooting rampage, killing a French lawyer and two American engineers at a five-star Cairo hotel not far from Thursday’s scene. They said he escaped Monday from a mental hospital.

The 33 German tourists were boarding their chartered bus shortly after noon, having just visited the stately, rose-colored museum, which is surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. Several other buses were parked behind, and the vast square was, as usual, jammed with taxis and minibuses serving the museum--one of Cairo’s main tourist attractions--as well as the Nile Hilton Hotel and several major government buildings nearby.

Suddenly, one of the attackers climbed inside the vehicle and threw down a homemade bomb, a large 7-Up bottle that police later said was filled with gasoline and kerosene, that engulfed the tour bus.

Another firebomb was tossed underneath. Simultaneously, the attackers--witness accounts of their number varied--began shooting. The police, who have routinely guarded all the country’s major tourist attractions since a wave of Islamic violence began in the early 1990s, answered with more gunfire. In the mayhem, there were several explosions, bullets tore through at least four buses and some of the panicked tourists broke windows and dived out.

“I didn’t see anything. I only heard gunshots,” said Beate Helmroth, 38, a tourist from Kassel, Germany, who had just boarded the bus. “Then my husband broke the window, and we jumped. There was a big explosion. I got very scared. We crawled to the museum fence, and there was an Egyptian man who dragged us into a taxi and on to the hospital.”

An eyewitness, mechanic Al Sayed Abdullah Hamed, was fixing a taxi near the museum when he first spotted the attack.

“Someone came out from under the bus, and then the bus exploded. There was a lot of fire coming out,” he said. “When the bus exploded, police and ambulances [were] everywhere.”

“It was like ‘Gunfight at the OK Corral,’ ” said an Australian tourist, Fabian Muir, quoted by Reuters. “Totally out of control. It went on for like 20 minutes. It seemed to go on forever.”

When it was over, the bus was a charred and gutted shell. Police threw blankets over burned remains of victims in the front of the bus. A single black sneaker lay on the pavement in a puddle of water.

In addition to those killed, at least nine of the tourists were injured and seven were still hospitalized late Thursday. Members of the German group who were well enough to travel planned to return home today.

The attack could be a severe blow to Egypt’s efforts to persuade potential visitors and investors that it has beaten its Islamic insurgency after an ironfisted policy that has seen thousands tried and imprisoned by special military courts.

Just Monday, in what was the largest subversion trial to date, a military court sentenced four Islamists to death and 68 others to lengthy prison terms. During that trial, the main militant group, the Gamaa al Islamiya, had offered a truce to authorities, which government officials dismissed.

The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights speculated that Thursday’s attack may have been the Islamic extremists’ answer to the death sentences.

The government, which sees tourism as a major pillar of economic growth and hopes to double the annual number of foreign visitors to 8 million within the decade, has much at stake in resisting such an interpretation.

“Terrorist attacks against tourists have stopped a long time ago due to the attitude of the Egyptian people,” the Tourism Ministry said in a statement Thursday night.

But American and European tourists near the scene were shaken, and some said they were considering leaving the country early.

It was the second encounter with terrorism in two weeks in the Middle East for Dirk Schaefer, 28, and Frank Zollmer, 27, journalism students from Dortmund, Germany. They had come to Egypt from Israel, where they were shortly after the suicide bombings of Sept. 4. “We saw it in [Jerusalem’s] Ben Yehuda Street, and now here,” Schaefer said. “I saw the bus, and suddenly I had this sick feeling in my stomach.”

“It’s a good thing we slept in,” said Todd Peever, 36, a businessman from Vancouver, Canada, who had intended to walk over to the Egyptian Museum on Thursday morning.

An Interior Ministry statement said the former mental patient arrested was Saber Farhat, who in 1993 opened fire on foreigners at the five-star Semiramis Hotel, only blocks from Thursday’s attack. Farhat’s brother Mahmoud was also arrested Thursday.

A police official told reporters that in addition to the Farhat brothers, a third, unidentified attacker was shot and seriously injured.

Thursday’s attack was the worst against foreigners in Egypt since April 1996, when gunmen with automatic weapons shot dead 18 Greek tourists at their hotel near the Pyramids in Giza. Gamaa al Islamiya claimed responsibility for the attack, saying that it had mistaken the tourists for Israelis.

More than 1,100 people have been killed during the militants’ six-year campaign of violence that has targeted intellectuals, police officers and Coptic Christians, as well as tourists.