Two German tourists have been killed in a knife attack at the Egyptian holiday resort town of Hurghada. Germany's foreign ministry suggested the attack intentionally targeted foreign tourists.
A man stabbed two tourists to death and injured four others at the Red Sea holiday resort town of Hurghada on Friday.
The two dead were female tourists from Germany, the German Foreign Ministry confirmed on Saturday. It added the attacker intended to target foreigners.
"From all we have gathered, the attack was meant to target foreign tourists - an especially perfidious and criminal act that leaves us sad, shocked and angry," the Foreign Ministry said.
The knifeman reportedly swam to the beach and killed the two women and wounded two other tourists at the Zahabia hotel before moving on to a neighboring beach to attack at least two more people at the Sunny Days El Palacio resort.
He had a knife with him and stabbed each of them three times in the chest. They died on the beach," the security manager at El Palacio hotel, Saud Abdelaziz, told Reuters. "He jumped a wall between the hotels and swam to the other beach."
Abdelaziz said two of the injured were Czech and two Armenian.
The wounded are being treated at a local hospital.
Workers and security at the hotels detained the man who carried out the knife attacks
The Interior Ministry said in a statement that the attack happened at about 11:00 local time (9:00 UTC) and that the assailant was taken into custody about noon. A security cordon was then established around the site of the attack to ensure the safety of other tourists.
The motive for the attack is still under investigation. "We don't know his motives yet, he could be crazy or perturbed - it's too early to tell," a senior interior ministry official told the French news agency AFP.
In January 2016, three tourists were also injured in a similar knife attack in Hurghada. That attack was carried out by two assailants with apparent "Islamic State" group (IS) sympathies.
The attack came only a few hours after five policemen were shot dead in Cairo's twin city of Giza, near the city's famed pyramids. No group claimed credit for that attack, which had similar characteristics as others carried out by the shadowy group Hasm.
Police believe the group is an offshoot of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, whose leader Mohamed Morsi was ousted as president in a 2013 military coup.
A typical beach in Hurghada.
Islamic insurgents have carried out a number of attacks in Egypt since the 2013 military ouster of Morsi, with the violence concentrated in the northern Sinai Peninsula. There, the insurgency is led by an IS affiliate that regularly targets security services and is believed to have orchestrated the bombing of a Russian airliner in 2015 that killed more than 200 people, mostly tourists.
IS has also targeted Egypt's Coptic Christian population several times over the past year, killing scores of worshippers.
The attack in Hurghada marks another blow to Egypt's struggling tourism industry, which employs millions of people and is a major source of foreign currency.
The once vibrant tourism industry has suffered since the 2011 Arab Spring protests and subsequent instability in the Arab world's most populous state.
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