Women Shoot Up Cairo Tourist Bus

Two veiled women in their 20s opened fire on a tour bus in a historic district of the Egyptian capital Saturday, then killed themselves, the Interior Ministry said. Two other people were wounded.

Two hours earlier a man suspected in a tourist bazaar bombing three weeks ago — the brother and fiancee of the women who shot up the bus — leapt from an overpass during a police chase and set off a bomb he was carrying.

After a string of brazen terror attacks during the 1990s, Egypt experienced a relative lull in such violence until October, when near simultaneous bomb blasts on two Sinai resorts killed 34 people. Then, on April 7, a suicide bomber targeted foreigners near a crowded Cairo bazaar.

The Saturday blast, near a 5-star hotel frequented by foreigners and behind the Egyptian Museum in downtown Cairo, killed the suspect, identified as Ehab Yousri Yassin, and wounded seven others, four of them foreigners.

A group calling itself the Abdullah Azzam Brigades claimed responsibility for the twin attacks in a statement posted on a Web forum used by Islamic militants. It said the attacks were in revenge for the deaths of those who carried out bombings last year in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and for the subsequent arrests of thousands of people.

The claim's authenticity could not be verified.

"The crimes you committed against the people of Sinai ... will not pass lightly," the statement said, addressing President Hosni Mubarak. "The time for your removal has come."

The group — whose name refers to a Palestinian militant who worked alongside Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and died there in 1989 — was one of several that claimed responsibility for the Sinai attacks at the resorts of Taba and Ras Shitan that killed 34 people and wounded more than 100.