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Female jihadis make their debut
A BOMBER injured seven people and two hours later his sister and fiancée attacked a tourist bus in Cairo, the Egyptian capital, yesterday as Islamic extremists resumed their campaign of terror against foreign visitors.The bomber leapt off a bridge while being chased by police behind the Egyptian Museum, one of Cairo's most popular tourist destinations. The device, described as a nail bomb, went off just after 3pm above a crowded street and bus station near the museum's rear entrance, killing the attacker. Four foreign tourists — an Israeli couple, an Italian and a Swede — were injured by the bomb. The Egyptian state media showed pictures of the attacker's body lying in a pool of blood, his head disfigured by the blast. Police said it was unclear whether the assailant had detonated the bomb himself. Eyewitnesses claimed to have seen the bomb being thrown from the bridge by a youth. "The explosion was caused by a very primitive bomb full of nails. Most of the injuries were superficial, caused by the destruction of the nails," said Mohammed Awad Tag Eddin, the Egyptian health minister. Daniel Seltham-White, from London, was among British tourists in the museum at the time. "We were on the second floor near the Tutankhamun exhibit, and we thought immediately that it was a bomb," said Seltham-White. "The last place we wanted to be was in a room full of foreigners." As police and security services crowded into the area, the two veiled women spread panic further south, pulling up behind a tourist bus and shooting wildly into its rear window near the Sayida Aisha mosque in the old city. The shots shattered the window but no one aboard the bus was injured. Police said one of the women was then shot dead by her accomplice, who promptly shot and wounded herself and died later in hospital. But according to witnesses, the police opened fire on the women, said to be in their twenties. Two Egyptian passers-by were wounded. Yesterday's onslaught followed a suicide blast in Cairo on April 7 that killed two French citizens and an American near the Khan al-Khalili market, also in the old city. The interior ministry said the man killed yesterday, Ihab Yousri Yassin from Saft, a town 35 miles south of Cairo, was the main suspect in the market bombing. Two of his alleged accomplices, Ashraf Saeed Youssef and Gamal Ahmed Abdel Aal, were captured earlier yesterday. The two women who attacked the bus were identified as Negat Yousri Yassin, the bomber's sister, and Iman Ibrahim Khamis, his girlfriend. The violence will revive fears in Egypt of a concerted effort by Islamic militants to cripple the tourist industry. The country has been largely calm since a wave of attacks between 1992 and 1997 orchestrated by extremists opposed to President Hosni Mubarak. But its main terror group, Jamaat al-Islamiyya, is closely allied with Al-Qaeda, which numbers several Egyptians among its leaders, including Osama Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The last attack near the prestigious Egyptian Museum — which houses many artefacts from the tomb of Tutankhamun — was in 1997, when two gunmen fired automatic rifles at a tour bus, killing nine Germans. In the same year militants killed 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians in Luxor, in the south of the country. Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-05-01 |
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