Two German women were stabbed to death and four other foreign tourists were wounded in a beach attack at a seafront hotel in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Hurghada on Friday.

The assault came just hours after five policemen were killed in a shooting near some of Egypt’s most famous pyramids outside of Cairo.

The knifeman killed two German women and wounded two other tourists at the Zahabia hotel in Hurghada and then swam to a neighbouring beach, where he attacked at least two more people – at the Sunny Days El Palacio resort – before he was arrested, according to officials and security sources.



“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 people were Czech and two were Armenian. They were being treated a local hospital. The Czech foreign ministry tweeted that one Czech woman sustained a minor leg injury.



The attacker’s motive was still under investigation, the interior ministry said.

A security official said the attacker, a man in his 20s dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, wielded a knife and intentionally sought to attack foreigners.

“Stay away, I don’t want Egyptians,” the assailant had said in Arabic during the attack, according to the official.

No group claimed responsibility for the killings of the five policemen but it bore the hallmarks of a smaller Islamic militant group known as Hasm that has been behind similar shootings in recent months.

Friday’s attacks threaten a new blow to the country’s struggling tourism industry and economy. The year before the 2011 uprising, nearly 15 million tourists visited Egypt.

Last year, the figure was at 5.3 million, according to official reports. In 2015, an Islamic State affiliate in Egypt downed a Russian plane over Sinai, killing all 224 passengers aboard.

Egypt has been rocked by deadly suicide bombings, drive-by shootings and other attacks since the 2013 military coup to remove the elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

The violence has been concentrated in the northern Sinai peninsula, but attacks have spread to the mainland, including the capital, where suicide bombers have struck churches and security headquarters.