Cairo: The mistaken air strike by the Egyptian military that killed a dozen people on a Mexican tourist trip in the Western Desert hit a picnic in the middle of the day, witnesses have said, raising new questions about both the extent of the error and the official explanations.

The convoy of four sport utility vehicles was about three hours south-west of Cairo on a typical tourist trip through the White Desert, an unearthly Western Desert area of chalk rocks, about midday on Sunday when a diabetic passenger complained that she needed to eat, according to a tour-guide official, witnesses and others briefed on the events.

So, with the blessing of their police escort and the added security of an Apache military helicopter buzzing on the horizon, the Egyptian guide and his four drivers pulled about 1500 metres off the road to prepare a meal.

Egypt's White Desert, where a car pulled over for a diabetic tourist, then was attacked by a military helicopter. Photo: AP

It was then that the helicopter opened fire, killing at least a dozen people – including at least two visiting Mexicans – while wounding a tourist policeman and at least 10 others.

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Some were gunned down as they tried to flee towards the top of a nearby sand dune, said Essam Monem, a resident of the area who arrived that night and saw the bodies in the sand.

The helicopter crew had mistaken the tourist picnic for a camp of Islamist militants operating in the area, the Interior Ministry said in a statement. But the accident has nonetheless killed more tourists than any terrorist attack in recent years. Analysts say it has threatened to do new damage to Egypt's already crippled tourist industry by raising questions about both the competence of the security forces and the prevalence of the militants they were attempting to hunt.

Acting Egyptian Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb arrives to visit injured Mexican tourists at a hospital in Cairo. Photo: AP

"What we saw was not just the lack of training of the military forces but also their desperation," said Mokhtar Awad, a researcher at the Centre for American Progress, who tracks Egyptian militant groups, noting that Islamic State militants in the area had also released photographs that appeared to show they had beaten back an army unit in battle earlier the same day.

"It tells you how chaotic the situation is," he said, "if they feel so desperate to put an end to this that they end up taking out what we gather is the first thing they see."

Initial reports on Sunday night from Egyptian security officials had said that the error took place late at night, when mistaking tourists for militants might be easier to imagine.

Mexican Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu: "We are waiting for the appropriate Egyptian authorities to give us access to better information that will allow us to know the situation of the rest of the affected people." Photo: Bloomberg

In its statement on Monday, the Interior Ministry sought instead to blame the tour guides, suggesting that the convoy had entered a "banned area" without permission.

A Mexican tourist group "was present in the same banned area" as a group of "terrorist elements" that the military and police forces had been chasing, the ministry's statement said. It also said a team had been formed to look into "the reasons and circumstances of the accident and the justifications for the presence of the tourist group in the aforementioned banned area".

But the official union of tour guides and friends of the trip's leader, who was killed in the attack, circulated photographs of the convoy's official permit on the internet. Union officials and friends of the guide said the tour had stuck to a common, widely used tourist route, passed through several police checkpoints, and moved only with the approval of its tourist police escort.

The group had "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," said Hassan el-Nahla, the chairman of the General Union of Tourist Guides.

"Egypt will pay the price of the impact of this incident on the tourism industry," he said.

Although the helicopter that conducted the attack was military, a spokesman for the Egyptian armed forces sought to deflect responsibility, saying "when it comes to tourists, it is a Ministry of Interior issue, not ours".

"This incident has nothing to do with the army even if the army and police carried out the operation together," the spokesman, Brigadier General Mohamed Samir, said. "This is the system of this country, and you don't have the right to question it."

In Mexico, Foreign Minister Claudia Ruiz Massieu​ said that two Mexican citizens had been killed and six more were wounded; reports in the Egyptian state media had initially said that eight Mexicans had died in the accident.

"We are waiting for the appropriate Egyptian authorities to give us access to better information that will allow us to know the situation of the rest of the affected people," Ms Ruiz Massieu said.

In a formal diplomatic note to the Egyptian ambassador, Mexico "expressed its deep consternation for these deplorable events and demanded that an expedited, exhaustive and thorough investigation is carried out".

The New York Times

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