Two dead, 18 hurt in Cairo nail bomb blast
A nail bomb exploded among a group of tourists in a historic Cairo bazaar yesterday, killing at least two people and wounding 18.
Yesterday’s attack was the first against foreign tourists in the Egyptian capital in more than seven years.
The dead included a Frenchwoman. Nine Egyptians and nine foreigners were injured, some critically, the interior ministry said. Brig Gen. Nabil al-Azabi, head of security in Cairo, said the second person killed may have been the bomber.
Officials said earlier that a Briton was among the injured, but there was some confusion over nationalities.
Many of the injured had severe wounds from nails packed in the bomb, doctors said. Among the wounded foreigners were four Americans – one of them in a coma - three French and a Turk, the ministry said. It also said an Italian was injured, but Italian diplomats leaving the hospital later said there were no Italians among the casualties and there was no explanation for the discrepancy.
The US Embassy in Cairo was putting out a warden message warning Americans to stay away from Khan al-Khalili, the sprawling bazaar area, and to use prudence elsewhere in the city, said embassy spokesman James Bullock. He would not confirm American casualties in the blast.
Witnesses said a man on a motorcycle appeared to set off the blast. Al-Azabi said initial investigations suggested the explosive was a homemade nail-packed bomb that went off prematurely. He said the second person killed, whose body was severely mutilated, may have been the man carrying the bomb.
Officials warned the death toll could rise, with four of the wounded in a critical condition and body parts still to be identified. Earlier a health ministry official said the other person killed was an American bystander, but later health minister Mohammed Awad Tag Eddin backed off the report.
Egypt has seen a long period of calm since it suppressed Islamic militants who in the 1990s carried out bombings and shootings against tourists in their campaign to bring down the government. The last significant attack on tourists in Cairo was in 1997, a year when another 62 were killed in another attack in Luxor.
At least two witnesses said a man on a motorcycle appeared to have set off a bomb near an organised tour group in the al-Moski bazaar, a maze of narrow alleys with shops selling jewellery, souvenirs and clothes connected to the biggest tourist souq, Khan al-Khalili.
Hours later, the site of the blast was littered with glass, metal fragments and body parts, as forensic experts and police investigators combed for evidence. Tag Eddin said the nationality of the second person killed in the blast was yet been determined because the body had been severely mutilated in the explosion.
The witnesses were not clear whether the man on the motorcycle was a suicide bomber or threw an explosive.
Police said they had taken two people in for questioning and were investigating a motorcycle found near the scene with nails scattered on the ground around it.
Rabab Rifaat, an Egyptian woman who was shopping in a store several yards from the blast, said she heard “a boom, a horrible sound, very loud. Everyone started running”.
She said she then saw a decapitated head flying through the air.
A large tour group was in the street, buying items at a market when the explosion went off, Rifaat said. Six or seven bodies lay on the ground afterward, some of them foreign-looking, and an Egyptian man ran with burns on his back and his clothes torn, Rifaat said. It was unclear if the bodies were dead or wounded.
French Embassy spokeswoman Bernadette Abou Bechara that a Frenchwoman, a tourist, was killed in the blast.
Hundreds of riot police sealed off the area, and two ambulances were at the scene. Tourists remained in Khan al-Khalili, several hundred yards outside the police cordon. Three officials from the US Embassy arrived at the scene about three hours after the explosion and tried to make their way through the police cordon.
A heavy police presence also surrounded al-Husseini University Hospital, where many of the wounded were taken. An elderly Egyptian woman sobbed as she tried to push into the hospital, past the cordon, to see a 15-year-old granddaughter that she believed had been wounded in the blast.
The Khan is the most famous of a number of closely packed bazaars near al-Azhar, one of the most prestigious Islamic institutions in the Sunni Muslim world, in Cairo’s old city.
Tourism is Egypt’s highest earner of foreign exchange – and was specifically targeted by Islamic extremists in the 1990s.
The last major militant attacks came in late 1997. In September that year, two gunmen fired automatic rifles at a tour bus parked outside the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo, killing 10 people – mostly German tourists. Two months later, militants killed 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians in an attack at a pharaonic temple in Luxor, southern Egypt.
Last October, explosions hit several hotels in the Sinai Peninsula, including one in the resort of Taba, killing 34 people. Egyptian authorities say that attack was linked to Israeli-Palestinian violence.
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