04-07-2005, 09:16 PM
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/06F...ACE09FEDEB1.htm
Thursday 07 April 2005, 21:06 Makka Time, 18:06 GMT
The attack took place close to Cairo's famed al-Azhar Mosque
A bomb has exploded in a Cairo tourist bazaar, killing four people, among them a US citizen and a French national, and wounding 18 others, Greater Cairo's security director said.
An earlier Egyptian Interior Ministry statement said the wounded - four French, three Americans, an Italian, a Turk and nine Egyptians - were taken to hospital where the French woman died.
A US official said in Washington at least three Americans were injured in the attack.
Police sources said a man on a motorbike threw the bomb into the busy tourist area in the centre of the Egyptian capital but the subsequent ministry statement made no mention of what caused the blast.
One witness said it appeared a man on a motorcycle set off a bomb in the middle of a group of foreigners.
'Horrible sound'
Rabab Rifaat, an Egyptian woman who was shopping in a store several metres from the blast, said the explosion appeared to have been caused by a man who was either carrying a bomb or had it on his motorcycle.
She said she heard "a boom, a horrible sound, very loud. Everyone started running", and that she then saw a decapitated head flying through the air.
Egyptian police cordon off the
site of Thursday's deadly blast
She said she saw six or seven bodies on the ground, some of them foreign-looking, but it was unclear if they were dead or wounded.
A number of tourist bazaars surround al-Azhar, one of the most prestigious Islamic institutions in the Sunni Muslim world, in Cairo's old city.
Egypt has largely seen calm since it suppressed a fierce campaign of violence by armed Muslim groups seeking to overthrow the government in the 1990s.