Bomb in Cairo tourist bazaar kills two

CAIRO - A man threw a bomb into a crowd of people in a Cairo bazaar popular with tourists on Thursday, killing a French woman and at least another person, government and security officials said.

Senior Health Ministry official Ahmed Adel had said earlier the explosion had killed four, including the French woman and a US citizen, and wounded 18 others.

The Interior and Health ministries later said two people had died and only the French woman had been identified.

Cairo Security Director Nabil el-Azabi said a man on foot threw the bomb into the crowd.

"There was a big explosion and everybody started running away," witness Rabab Rifaat said. Another witness, who asked not to be named, saw at least five foreign nationals badly wounded and a large amount of smoke in the el-Hussein area of Cairo's medieval Islamic district.

The wounded -- four French, three Americans, an Italian, a Turk and nine Egyptians -- were taken to hospital where the French woman died, an Interior Ministry statement said. It did not give the cause of the blast.

The bomb went off on one of Cairo's streets lined with stores popular with tourists and near Cairo's al-Azhar mosque. Police sealed off the road which was covered with shattered glass and shops were closed.

There was no immediate indication of the motive of the attack.

The bombing was the latest in a series of attacks on tourists in Egypt, which millions of foreign nationals visit each year to see Pharaonic sites and holiday at Red Sea resorts.

An Egyptian man stabbed and wounded two Hungarian tourists in central Cairo last month in what police said was revenge for Western policies towards Iraqis and Palestinians.

A series of bombings in Egyptian Red Sea resorts killed 34 people last October.

Tourists, who provide Egypt with a main source of its hard currency, were frequently attacked by Islamist militants waging an insurgency against the Egyptian government in the 1990s.

An attack in 1997 at a Pharaonic temple near the southern town of Luxor killed 58 tourists and badly hit the industry for a long time. Tourists returned slowly and last year witnessed a record number of visitors to the country.

- REUTERS