CAIRO // Twelve people mistakenly killed by Egypt’s security forces, including Mexican tourists, were in an “off-limits” area, the country’s interior ministry said yesterday.
The incident occurred on Sunday when a joint police and military operation “chasing terrorist elements” in the vast Western Desert “mistakenly” targeted four pickup trucks carrying Mexican tourists, the ministry said.
It did not give a casualties breakdown but said the dead also included Egyptians. Ten other people were wounded.
Mexican foreign minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu told reporters that at least two Mexican tourists had been killed in an air strike.
Egypt’s interior ministry did not indicate how the group was targeted.
The group had arrived in Cairo on September 11 and left two days later, making their way to the Bahariya oasis.
Six Mexican survivors told Mexico’s ambassador to Cairo that they had stopped for a meal when they “suffered an aerial attack with bombs launched by a plane and helicopters”, Ms Ruiz Massieu said.
She added that Mexico had expressed its “deep dismay over these deplorable events” in a diplomatic note to Cairo’s ambassador, demanding a “swift, exhaustive and deep investigation”.
She said Egypt had pledged to create an investigative committee into the incident that would be headed by the prime minister.
In an earlier tweet, Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto had demanded “an exhaustive investigation about what happened from the government of Egypt”.
Mexico’s envoy in Cairo had visited wounded nationals in the city’s Dar Al Fouad Hospital where they were listed as being in a stable condition, the Mexican foreign ministry said.
Sunday’s incident was likely to raise further concerns for Egypt’s vital tourism industry, which has struggled to recover from years of political and economic chaos.
The Western Desert, a popular destination for tour groups, extends from the suburbs of Cairo to the border with Libya.
According to a senior tourism ministry official, the incident happened as the tourists were travelling between Cairo and the Bahariya oasis, about 350 kilometres south-west of the capital.
A police source said that special forces were on Sunday carrying out an operation involving air support about 150 kilometres west of Bahariya.
The desert is also a militant hideout, and Western embassies have long warned against non-essential travel to the area.
Last month, Egypt’s branch of ISIL beheaded a young Croatian who was working in the area for a French company. The ISIL affiliate, which calls itself “Sinai Province”, has also attacked security forces there several times.
The group said in a statement that it had “resisted a military operation in the Western Desert” on Sunday, but gave no other details.
Egypt has been struggling to quell a militant insurgency since the military overthrew president Mohammed Morsi in 2013, focusing mainly on the militants’ primary holdout in the Sinai Peninsula in the east.
The country has one of the region’s most powerful and well-equipped militaries, and was further boosted by recent deliveries of F-16 warplanes by Washington and Rafale fighters from France.
Last week, the army launched an anti-ISIL operation in the Sinai which it said had killed 56 militants.
The government says that hundreds of police and soldiers have been killed, many in attacks claimed by Sinai Province.
The beheading of Croatian engineer Tomislav Salopek appeared aimed at scaring off tourists and foreign employees of Western firms – two cornerstones of an economy battered by years of unrest since the 2011 uprising that ousted then-president Hosni Mubarak.
About 10 million tourists visited Egypt in 2014, down sharply from a 2010 figure of almost 15 million drawn by Egypt’s archaeological sites and Red Sea resorts.
* Agence France-Presse