LUXOR, Egypt — The passengers of the luxury river cruiser called the Nile Elite were just sitting down to lunch when a series of loud cracks rang out from the west bank of the Nile. Many ran to windows, eager to see what sounded like a traditional celebration on shore.
What they saw were four men with scarves wrapped around their faces, each of them pointing automatic rifles at the ship. The passengers screamed and dived for cover. The cook and a tour guide collapsed with bullets in their legs. The ship manager's office was badly shot up. Twelve windows elsewhere on the vessel were broken. Some of the bullets pierced the ship's metal hull.
"I was very sure this was no celebration. I cried very loudly, 'Everybody on the floor, at once!' " said the manager, Said Batouty. "Imagine, 140 Germans on board. It could have been a complete disaster. In a 10-year career, I've never seen anything like this."
But it wasn't to be the end of the attacks. On Wednesday afternoon, gunmen hiding in a farm field opened fire on a small tour bus in southern Egypt, killing a British tourist and wounding two others. An Islamic fundamentalist group boldly claimed responsibility for the attack.
After months of escalating clashes with police, Islamic extremists have moved against Egypt's tourist industry, a $3-billion-a-year bonanza that is the country's biggest money earner and, for religious conservatives, the irritating source of waves of beer-guzzling, immodestly clad foreigners.
"Tourism is our second target, after high-level political leaders, in the bid to implement Islamic law in Egypt," the outlawed fundamentalist group Gamaa al Islamiya said in a statement Thursday acknowledging the attack on the British tourists. A caller to a foreign news agency said the shooting was a response to "torture, repeated detention and prevention of the call to God."
Investigators said at least three gunmen fired 90 bullets at the tourist minibus, which was carrying nine foreigners on a jaunt past the historic temples and monuments that dot the southern Egyptian countryside.
The attack was the ninth and most serious this year against foreign tourists in Egypt, but Islamic extremists have been escalating their violence dramatically in the past few weeks.
Just days after the attack on the Nile Elite early this month, a suspected Islamic activist was blown up on a passenger train in the fundamentalist stronghold of Dairut when, authorities say, he attempted to hurl a bomb out of the train window onto a crowded station platform. Three others were killed and 10 injured in the blast, all of them Egyptians.
