Suicide bomber and two gunmen attack Karnak temple in Luxor

A suicide bomber and two gunmen attacked the Karnak temple in Luxor on Wednesday in the second assault in a week against Egypt’s premier tourist sites, an ominous turn in the violence against the government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.

Stopped by the police in the parking lot outside the temple, one of the attackers blew himself up with a suicide belt. A second was killed in a gunfight with the police, and the third attacker and at least one officer were wounded. The temple was unharmed.

Merely by signalling their intent to attack the tourist industry, however, the militants are threatening to cut off a vital engine of the Egyptian economy, which Mr el-Sissi’s government had just begun to announce was sputtering back after four years of turmoil.

Luxor, in particular, evokes memories of the government’s long battle to crush an earlier Islamist insurgency that flared up two decades ago, reaching an apex in 1997 when a dozen gunmen massacred 58 tourists and six Egyptians at another ancient temple just across the Nile.

Just a week before the attack in Luxor on Wednesday, gunmen on a motorcycle fatally shot two tourism police officers near the gate to reach the pyramids of Giza and the Sphinx, across the Nile from Cairo and about 400 miles north of Luxor.

– (New York Times)