At least two Mexicans and 10 others have died after their vehicles were accidentally attacked by Egyptian security forces in the country’s western desert.
The Egyptian interior ministry said a joint policy and military force was “chasing terrorist elements” in the area when it “accidentally engaged four four-wheel drives belonging to a Mexican tourist group”.
It said 12 had been killed and 10 injured in the shooting, understood to have taken place at the Bahariya oasis around 4pm on Sunday, local time.
Mexico’s foreign ministry said two of the victims and at least five of the injured were Mexican nationals, but was “confirming the identities of other possible victims”.
“Mexico condemns these acts against our citizens and has called on the government of Egypt for a thorough investigation of what happened,” Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, said in a statement on social media.
An Egyptian human rights lawyer, Amr Imam, told the Guardian that one his relatives, Awad Fathi, was among six Egyptians killed in the convoy.
He said Fathi, 37, was a manager and tour guide operator at the Kisr al-Buwati Hotel in the Bahariya oasis, a popular tourist stop around 370km south of Cairo.
A spokesman for the Egyptian tourism ministry said the tour group did not have the correct permits to be in the area and that their presence was “illegal”.
“A working group has been formed to examine the causes and circumstances of the incident as well as the justification for the presence of a tourist group in a region to which access is prohibited,” the interior ministry said in a statement.
The Mexican government said the injured had been taken to Dar-el-Fouad hospital in Giza, south-west of central Cairo, where they were being attended to by consular staff.
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