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Tourist killed, 22 people wounded in Cairo bombing
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Tourist killed, 22 people wounded in Cairo bombing
AFP - Monday, February 23
CAIRO (AFP) - - A bomb at a landmark Cairo bazaar Sunday killed a French tourist and wounded 22 people, most of them holidaymakers, in the first deadly violence against Westerners in Egypt since 2006.
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The attack struck in the early evening in a street lined with cafes and restaurants in Khan al-Khalili, a 1,500-year-old market that is one of the Egyptian capital's main tourist attractions, witnesses told AFP.
There were conflicting accounts as to how the attack was carried out.
Witnesses and a police official told AFP that two grenades were thrown from a rooftop overlooking the street. The second device failed to detonate and was blown up in a controlled explosion, a police source said.
The state MENA news agency cited a security source, however, as saying that the explosives had been left under a bench in a plastic bag packed with nails.
A 17-year old French girl died in hospital from her injuries, Health Minister Hatem al-Gabali told state television.
"The victim was 17 years old and had traveled with a group of young people from Levallois," foreign ministry spokesman Eric Chevallier told AFP, referring to the Levallois-Perret suburb of Paris.
The wounded consisted of 15 French tourists -- three of them with more serious injuries -- one German, three Saudis and three Egyptians, a security source said.
Levallois-Perret's deputy mayor, Isabelle Balkany, said 17 teenagers from her city aged 14 to 17 were hospitalised. Sixteen suffered minor injuries while a young man was "more seriously hurt," she added.
"A crisis team was set up at city hall with psychologists. All the parents were attended to," Balkany said.
The families of the girl who died and the seriously wounded young man will fly to Cairo on Monday, she added.
The television showed footage of the health minister visiting the casualties in hospital. He said most of them had sustained shrapnel wounds and that one of them had needed surgery.
The French foreign ministry confirmed that one national had been killed. It said that eight more were among the wounded.
Egyptian state television showed bomb disposal teams combing the usually packed neighbourhood for other devices after the attack.
"There was smoke and a woman crying," a witness told the television.
"We closed our shops. They said that maybe something was thrown from the roof of the hotel."
The bombs went off outside the Al-Hussein hotel, just across the square from the Hussein mosque, which dates back to 1154 AD and is among the Egyptian capital's oldest places of worship.
The head of Cairo's Al-Azhar University -- Sunni Islam's highest religious authority -- condemned the bombing in a statement carried by the state MENA news agency.
"Those who carried out this criminal act are traitors to their own religion and their nation, and they are distorting the image of Islam which rejects terrorism and bans the killing of innocents," Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed al-Tantawi said.
It was the first deadly attack on tourists in the Egyptian capital since a previous bomb attack in the same neighbourhood which killed two tourists and wounded 18 in 2005.
In April 2006, 20 holidaymakers were killed in the Red Sea resort of Dahab, one of a series of bombings in the Sinai peninsula that were blamed on militants loyal to Al-Qaeda.
Egypt was struck by a spate of deadly attacks on Westerners by Islamic militant groups in the 1990s that dealt a savage blow to the country's vital tourism sector.
Italian tourist Francesca Camera, 29, told AFP she was frightened by the new attack. She only arrived in Cairo on Saturday and made Khan al-Khalili her first place to visit.
"I don't feel safe any more," she said. "I was planning to visit the Pyramids tomorrow, but now I think it's risky. There might be another attack, so I won't go."
Souvenir shop owner Taha, 20, slammed the bombers, accusing them of trying to destroy the country and its vital tourism income.
"They killed my livelihood, these people. They just want to destroy our country. No Muslim, no Christian can do that," he said.
Last year, a total of 13 million tourists visited Egypt, earning it 11 billion dollars in revenues, or 11.1 percent of GNP. The industry also employs 12.6 percent of the workforce.
France accounted for 600,000 of last year's tourists, behind Russia with 1.8 million, Britain and Germany with 1.2 million each, and Italy with 1 million.
Only remittances from foreign workers and receipts from shipping through the Suez Canal rank anywhere near as importantly as sources of revenue for Egypt, the Arab world's most populous nation.
US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and a host of top foreign diplomats are expected to visit Cairo on March 2, to participate in a donor conference to help rebuild Gaza following Israel's recent military operations.
The US State Department had no immediate reaction to the blast but said there was no indication that any Americans were among the hurt or injured.
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