Alalam - Egypt

Egypt on Sunday sentenced to life two men linked to the ISIS (ISIL, IS, Daesh) for plotting an attack on a Red Sea resort hotel during which three tourists were hurt, a court official said, according to AFP.

The men armed with knives stormed the restaurant of the Bella Vista hotel in Hurghada last January as tourists were having dinner.

An elderly Austrian couple and a Swedish tourist were lightly wounded in the attack.

No one claimed responsibility for the attack, during which police shot dead one of the assailants, Mohamad Hassan Mohamed Mahfouz, and wounded the other, Mohamed Magdy Abul Kheir, according to AFP.

The prosecution said the pair had plotted the attack along with fellow Egyptian Ahmad Abdel Salam Mansour, identified as an ISIS terrorists based in Syria where ISIS is active.

The court official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP that Abul Kheir was present in court for the verdict while Mansour was sentenced to life in absentia.

According to the prosecution, Mansour incited the other two to carry out attacks against tourists in Hurghada and to join ISIS.

Egypt’s ISIS affiliate has for years waged an insurgency in the north of the Sinai Peninsula that has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers.

Among the attacks claimed by the group, which calls itself Sinai Province, were the assassination of a top Egyptian police general, who was gunned down as he left his home in a west Cairo neighborhood, and a bus bombing on a tour bus filled with South Korean tourists in the Sinai.

The jihadists have claimed attacks on other targets in Egypt as well, including a bomb attack on a Coptic church in Cairo this month that killed 27 people.

ISIS said it is also behind the October 2015 bombing of a Russian airliner carrying holidaymakers from the Sharm el-Sheikh Red Sea resort, an attack that killed all 224 people on board and that crippled Egypt's tourism industry and economy.

SA