Wed, Sep 16, 2015 page7

• Mexican minister heading to Egypt

  ‘TERRIBLE LOSS’: At least two Mexicans were confirmed dead after security forces fired on a group of tourists by mistake while hunting jihadists in the White Desert

  • AFP, CAIRO
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  The Mexican foreign minister flew to Cairo late on Monday to seek answers from Egyptian authorities over an airstrike that mistakenly killed Mexican tourists.

  “We face a terrible loss of human lives and an unjustified attack that obligates us to make the protection of our citizens the priority,” Mexican Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu told reporters at Mexico City’s international airport.

  Ruiz Massieu said she was traveling with seven relatives of some of the victims, as well as Mexican doctors to care for the wounded. A foreign ministry official said the plane took off at 11:46pm.

  

  An off-road vehicle moves among chalk inselbergs in the White Desert southwest of Cairo, Egypt, on Sept. 2, 2007.

  Photo: AFP

  At least two Mexicans were confirmed dead, while another six were wounded.

  She said her government still could not confirm what happened to six other nationals.

  Egyptian authorities have said that a total of 12 people were killed and 10 wounded on Sunday when security forces fired on the group of tourists by mistake while hunting jihadists in the White Desert.

  Ruiz Massieu said she would hold talks with top Egyptian officials in order to “obtain first-hand information that can clear up the circumstances of this deplorable event which has cost the lives of innocent Mexican tourists.”

  Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has demanded an exhaustive investigation by Egypt, which has vowed to form an investigative committed headed by the prime minister.

  The minister earlier said the tour group had arrived in Cairo on Sept. 11 and left two days later for the Bahariya oasis.

  She said the six Mexican survivors told the Mexican ambassador they had stopped for a meal when they “suffered an aerial attack with bombs launched by a plane and helicopters.”

  US Department of State spokesman John Kirby said US embassy staff were checking “reports of a potential US citizen involved.”

  He refused to be drawn on reports that Apache attack helicopters built and supplied by the US were used in the raid.

  Relatives identified one of the dead as 41-year-old Rafael Bejarano Rangel, a musician whose mother, Marisela Rangel, was wounded in the attack.

  The incident is likely to raise further concerns for Egypt’s vital tourism industry, which has struggled to recover from years of political and economic chaos.

  A senior tourism ministry official said the incident happened when the tourists were between Cairo and the Bahariya oasis, about 370km southwest of the capital.

  Egypt has been struggling to quell a jihadist insurgency since the military overthrew former Islamist Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in 2013, focused mainly on their primary holdout in the Sinai Peninsula in the east.

  After launching brazen attacks targeting security forces in North Sinai over the past two years, militants are increasingly adopting tactics similar to the main Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.

  In July, the group claimed an attack on the Italian consulate in Cairo that killed one civilian and it also took responsibility for the killing of a US employee of oil company Apache last year in the Western Desert.

  The beheading in July of Croatian engineer Tomislav Salopek, claimed by Islamic State, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, 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 former Egyptian presient Hosni Mubarak.
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