THE MIDDLE East situation took another deadly turn yesterday with the apparent resumption of attacks on tourists by Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt.
Gunmen killed 17 tourists and one Egyptian as they boarded a tour bus outside a hotel in the capital, Cairo.
Most of the victims were elderly Greek pilgrims on a tour of the Holy Land. They had arrived from Israel the previous day after spending Orthodox Easter in Jerusalem.
Last night, Greece was sending one of its air force jets to collect the bodies of its nationals.
Four men armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles drove up to the Europa hotel, near the Giza pyramids on the outskirts of the city, at about 7 a.in. local time and opened fire on the tourists as they walked from the hotel lobby to a bus parked outside.
As the dead and injured lay in pools of blood the gunmen escaped on foot into the densely populated neighbourhood behind the hotel. The incident lasted for less than a minute, eyewitnesses said.
Police later sealed off the area around the hotel and increased by checks on roads leading out of the city.
Later in the morning chaos reigned at the scene as journalists and passers by jostled with dazed hotel guests and security men. The bullet riddled bus that was to take the pilgrims on a tour of the Mediterranean city of Alexandria remarried behind a police cordon. Bloodstains in the hotel foyer outside the entrance provided gruesome markers of where the victims fell.
By early yesterday group had claimed for the massacre, although it thought to have been carried by the Gama'a which has been waging a campaign to overthrow the government of President Mubarak.
A statement from the Ministry of the Interior blamed the on "terrorists", a euphemism the militants, who have hit tourist targets in the past and repeatedly warned foreign tourists to stay away from Egypt.
But diplomats and analysts were speculating on the possibility that the attack was a reprisal for Israel's military operation in Lebanon. There has been public anger in Egypt and through out the world over the Lebanese deaths. Because the Greek group had come from Jerusalem there is a chance the gunmen assumed they were Israelis, who often stay at the Europa Hotel, according to tour operators.
Whatever the motivation, the massacre is by far the bloodiest seen in Egypt. Although there have been 23 attacks on tourist targets since 1992, most have resulted in no more than minor injuries. In all, eight tourists had been killed up to yesterday.
If the Gama'a al-Islamiyya was in fact responsible for yesterday's carnage, it is a serious blow to the government, which claims that its hardline policies against the militants have crippled their ability to mount terrorist attacks. For more than a year the police have confined militant activity to Minya province in the south of the country, and this is the first attack in Cairo since December 1993.
That well armed gunmen were able to carry out such an operation in the capital, and then escape, will come as a major embarrassment to a government anxious for the success of the tourist industry. Until yesterday, the government and tourist industry officials had been celebrating the return of a record 3.1 million tourists in 1995 after a two year slump caused by the militants' campaign.
Tour operators in Cairo said it was too early to say whether there would be a lot of cancellations and tried to make light of the massacre. "These random attacks happen all over the world," said one. "Just look at London and Paris. It's far safer here."