Attacks on tourists

last updated 8 January 2015

Cairo

Egyptian police this week rounded up more than 200 people for questioning, following two attacks on foreign tourists. Ihab Yousri Yassin, 24, blew himself up near the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Then, his fiancée and sister opened fire on a tour bus. Nine people were injured in the attacks, four of them foreigners. Yassin and his family were not known to be members of any extremist group, and Egyptian officials were quick to classify the violence as an isolated incident. In the 1990s, Islamic extremists crippled the Egyptian economy with a wave of bloody attacks on foreigners that caused tourism to plummet, and officials fear the same thing could happen again.