Egyptian military mistakenly bombed Mexican tourists on safari

Egyptian security forces hunting for armed men in a remote area of the western desert mistakenly carried out an airstrike on a group of tourists on safari breaking for lunch, killing at least 12 people, including Mexican nationals, officials and witnesses said Monday.

Reports of the number of Mexicans killed in the strike vary from two to eight.

Egyptian officials said the safari group did not have permission to be in the area, but have not offered a full account of Sunday's incident, in which another 10 people were wounded.

However, the sister of one of the victims Rafael Bejarano said the tour group was in fact in a permitted area when the attack occurred.

"They were in a permitted area,” Reuters reported Gabriela Bejarano saying. “On this occasion they didn't stay to camp, because that was what was not permitted."

The convoy of four sport utility vehicles stopped midday when a diabetic passenger requested a break to eat, the New York Times reported a tour guide official and witnesses as saying.

Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto condemned the attack and demanded a full investigation.

Mexican Foreign Secretary Claudia Ruiz Massieu said survivors told officials they were fired upon by military helicopters and other aircraft. In a news conference late Monday in Mexico City, Ruiz Massieu repeated that Mexican authorities were demanding a full investigation into the incident and that her government had still only confirmed that two Mexicans were killed and six wounded in the attack. She said authorities were still trying to find out what happened to another six tourists.

She will accompany relatives of the Mexican victims on the flight to Cairo. 

The incident, among the deadliest involving tourists in Egypt, dealt another blow to the government's efforts to project stability and revive the tourism industry, a key earner that was hit hard by the years of turmoil following the 2011 uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt has been battling insurgents on the other side of the country, in the northern Sinai Peninsula. In recent months a powerful Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant affiliate based there has carried out attacks on the mainland, including the bombing of the Italian Consulate in Cairo and the kidnapping and beheading of a Croatian oil surveyor who was working in the capital.

By late Monday, Jorge Alvarez Fuentes, Mexico's ambassador to Egypt, told local media that two dead Mexican citizens in addition to Bejarano had been identified as Luis Barajas Fernandez and Maria de Lourdes Fernandez Rubio.

Mona el-Bakri, the spokeswoman for the Dar al-Fouad hospital where the wounded were being treated, said two of the seven Mexicans receiving treatment also hold American citizenship. A State Department official said an American woman was injured. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to say more because the woman had not waived her privacy rights.

Egypt's Interior Ministry said in a statement that a joint military-police force was pursuing "terrorist elements" in the area and fired on four vehicles that turned out to be carrying tourists. The ministry said the victims were Egyptian and Mexican.

Egyptian officials claim the safari convoy had wandered into a restricted area. The tour company involved "did not have permits and did not inform authorities," Rasha Azazi, a spokeswoman for the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism, told The Associated Press, adding that any trips to that area must be cleared by officials. "They were not supposed to be there," she said, without providing further information about the incident.

The chairman of the tour group, General Union of Tourist Guides said in a statement that there was “no information that this region is banned, no warning signs, and no instructions from checkpoints on the road, or the Tourism & Antiquities policeman present with them,” the New York Times reported.

Military spokesman Brig. Gen. Mohammed Samir said he was not authorized to speak on the matter, and Interior Ministry officials have not responded to numerous requests for comment.

Hamada Hashem, a desert guide living in a nearby village who witnessed the airstrike, said it appeared to have been linked to the kidnapping of a local resident named Saleh Qassim Said two days earlier.

Hashem said police and local residents, including himself, mounted a rescue operation, but the heavily armed combatants drove them off. The police then asked the military to get involved, he said.

On Sunday the ISIL's Egypt affiliate circulated photos purportedly showing clashes with security forces and what it said was the beheaded body of Said, who it accused of being a "spy" for the security services, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, a U.S.-based group that monitors websites of armed rebel groups.

Hashem said local security forces advise against going to the desert areas around his village, but they often turn a blind eye, knowing how important the desert safaris are to the local economy.

"The army says don't go there, but they know that we can't find anything to eat, so when [a tourist] comes, we resist [the military], say 'no, we will go,' and go," Hashem said. "After what I have seen, I will not spend the night in the desert again."

Egypt's western desert has long been a popular safari destination, with tourists flocking to its oases, unique rock formations and white sand dunes.

Egyptian security forces frequently target smugglers in the western desert, and in July 2014, gunmen armed with rocket-propelled grenades attacked a border guard post, killing 21 troops.

Al Jazeera and wire services