LONDON: Egypt’s tourism industry has been left reeling by the killing of two German tourists at a popular Red Sea resort.

Business owners in the coastal town of Hurghada were stunned by the stabbing of two German women on Friday.

Tourist numbers in the resort had only just started to recover from the impact of earlier terror attacks across Egypt.

The knifeman stabbed the two women to death and is thought to have wounded two others at the Zahabia Hotel before swimming to a neighboring beach to attack at least two more people at the Sunny Days El Palacio resort before being arrested.

Tour operators in the town who spoke to Arab News yesterday expressed their shock and anger at the killings, which came as the battered tourism sector was starting to show signs of recovery as European holidaymakers were starting to make a tentative return.

“These are crazy people,” said Tamer Wajeeh, whose tour operator business Red Sea Reisen is about 3km from the scene of the first attack.

He said that most of his customers were from Germany and business this year has been better than any of the previous four years.

Ahmed Sameer who runs the nearby Egypt Tours Portal said that he had also observed rising numbers of tourists from the UK and Germany visiting the resort that is famous for its diving excursions.

Egyptian police ramped up security around the resort on Friday and sealed off the beach in front of the Zahabia Hotel.

Before Friday’s attack, Egyptian tourism chiefs expected the number of tourists visiting the country to approach levels last seen before its 2011 uprising.

About 9.3 million tourists visited the country in 2015 compared to about 14.7 million in 2010.

German market researcher GfK told Reuters in April that German holidaymakers’ bookings to Egypt in this summer were up 91 percent from last year.

We now have the sad certainty that two German women were killed in the attack in Hurghada,” a German Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told the newswire.

“According to what we know, the act was a deliberate attack on foreign tourists — a particularly devious and criminal act that leaves us sad, dismayed and furious,” she added.

Judicial sources told AFP that the man being detained had confessed to sharing the ideology Daesh, although there was no Daesh claim of responsibility.

The 28-year-old suspect from Kafr Al-Sheikh province in the Nile Delta, north of Cairo, has been transferred to the capital for questioning.

The streets of Hurghada were being heavily patrolled and security was stepped up outside hotels on Saturday.

“I was sitting down in my shop when we heard people shouting. We ran outside and heard that someone had swum to the next door hotel and was attacking foreigners,” said Rafic Rushdi, the owner of a hotel shop.

“After killing two women, he ran toward our hotel. He was shouting that he was not after Egyptians, and some Egyptians intervened to stop him.”

After initial confusion over the nationality of the women killed, Berlin on Saturday said they were both German nationals, rather than Ukrainians as earlier reported.

“I am very upset by this cowardly crime, my condolences to the families of the victims,” German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said.

Among the four others wounded were two Armenian women and a woman from the Czech Republic, according to authorities in those countries.

It was not the first attack in Hurghada. In January 2016, three tourists were wounded in a stabbing assault in the resort by two assailants with apparent IS sympathies.

Hurghada is one of Egypt’s most popular beach resorts, especially with Ukrainians and other European tourists.

Egyptian authorities say they have boosted security at the country’s tourist sites, as the industry provides the Arab world’s most populous country with much-needed revenues.

Also on Friday, unknown assailants shot dead five policemen just south of Cairo, in the latest of a series of attacks targeting Egypt’s security forces.

The killings came as police and the army said they were closing in on militants and jihadists following a spate of deadly attacks in the Nile Valley and the Sinai Peninsula.