Koreans among four killed in bombing of tourist bus in Sinai

Bus driver among dead as blast strikes bus full of Korean tourists near Taba border crossing into Israel.

The wreckage of a tourist bus that was hit by a bomb blast on February 16, 2014, in the Egyptian south Sinai resort town of Taba. Three Koreans and the Egyptian bus driver were killed. AFP

CAIRO // A bomb tore through a bus carrying South Korean tourists near an Egyptian border crossing with Israel on Sunday, killing at least four people and wounding 13.

The bombing marked the first attack on tourists since the removal of president Mohammed Morsi in July sparked unrest across the country.

The bomb went off in the front section of bus carrying the tourists at Taba border crossing with Israel in south Sinai, the interior ministry said, adding that one of those killed was the Egyptian driver.

Health ministry spokesman Ahmed Kamel said four people were killed in the explosion and 13 were injured.

The interior ministry said in a statement the tourists had set off from Cairo and were waiting at the crossing to enter Israel when the explosion took place.

A spokesman for the Israel Airports Authority, which is responsible for border security, said that the Taba crossing had been closed after the blast.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Scores of policemen and soldiers have been killed in bombings in Sinai and the Nile Delta, but Sunday’s attack was the first targeting tourists since Mr Morsi was removed.

The unrest has severely hit tourism, a vital earner in Egypt, which has been targeted sporadically by militants over the past two decades.

The government’s census agency said the number of tourists was down in December 2013 by almost 31 per cent compared with the same month in 2012.

The Brotherhood, now designated as a terrorist group, denies its involvement in the bombings.

The deadliest attacks have been claimed by the Sinai-based Ansar Beit Al Maqdis group, whose leadership is drawn from militant Bedouin who want an Islamist state in the peninsula.

Between 2004 and 2006, scores of Egyptians and foreign tourists were killed in a spate of bombings in resorts in south Sinai.

In 1997, Islamist militants massacred dozens of tourists in a pharaonic temple in the southern city of Luxor.

In Cairo, a French tourist was killed in a 2009 bombing at the historic Khan Al Khalil bazaar, which police at the time blamed on militants from the neighbouring Palestinian Gaza Strip.

* Agence France-Presse