Two Armenians Wounded in Egyptian Beach Resort Attack

Two Armenian nationals were wounded on Friday in a mass stabbing in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Hurghada which left two other foreign tourists dead.

News reports said an Egyptian man stabbed two German women to death and wounded two other tourists at a local hotel and then swam to a neighboring beach to attack at least two more people at the Sunny Days El Palacio resort before he was arrested. The motive for his attack was not immediately known.

The Egyptian Interior Ministry said that the wounded tourists were rushed to a local hospital. The security manager at the El Palacio hotel told Reuters that two of them are Armenians.

Armenia’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that, citing information received from the Armenian Embassy in Cairo. “The Embassy has contacted the injured Armenian citizens,” it said on its Twitter page. “Their life is not in danger. Medical aid is provided.”

The ministry spokesman, Tigran Balayan, tweeted separately that “the attacker was neutralized with the help of our wounded citizen.”

The stabbings came hours after five Egyptian police officers were shot to death in Cairo’s twin city of Giza. Twenty-three Egyptian troops were killed in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula a week ago, in an assault claimed by the so-called Islamic State militant group.

The Foreign Ministry in Yerevan urged Armenians to refrain from trips to Egypt following the October 2015 bombing of a Russian plane over the Sinai. The ministry repeated the warning in January 2016.