CAIRO - Four people were killed, including a French national, in a bomb attack on one of Cairo`s main tourist areas Thursday that wounded eight others, security sources said.
Initial reports said the blast in downtown Cairo close to the Al-Azhar mosque was traced to a motorcycle. The fate of the vehicle`s owner was not known. It was not immediately clear what had caused the blast.
But some eyewitness reports, which were not confirmed by the police, said the explosion occurred after a man riding the motorcycle threw a bomb at a group of tourists in the area.
The area has been cordoned-off and hundreds of police have already arrived. Several ambulances were on the scene.
Al-Azhar is considered the most important religious university in the Sunni Muslim world and is attended by 90,000 students.
The Al-Azhar mosque and university are in the middle of Cairo`s most popular tourist district, which includes the Khan al-Kahalili open-air bazaar.
Thousands of tourists pass through the area every day, buying souvenirs from stalls that line the area`s maze of medieval alleyways.
Egypt -- a hugely popular destination for tourists owing to its Pharaonic monuments, Nile cruies and Red Sea coast -- has been rocked by major attacks against tourists in recent years.
The Egyptian economy is heavily dependent on tourism and has been severely hit by previous attacks.
In October last year, 34 people, including several Israeli tourists, were killed and more than 10 wounded in triple bomb attacks on the Hilton hotel Taba and two other neighbouring resorts in the Sinai peninsula.
The Sinai attack was the worst on tourists in Egypt since 1997 when some 58 foreign holidaymakers were killed in a attack in the southern city of Luxor that was claimed by the extremist group Jammaa Islamiyya.
Late last month, an Egyptian man stabbed and wounded a Hungarian man and his wife after spotting them kissing in Khan al-Khalili.
Another Egyptian man stabbed an Australian and two Norwegian tourists in the same area of Cairo in February last year after mistaking them for Americans.
The attacker claimed to be angered by Israeli and US "aggression" in the Middle East.
The new bomb attack also follows a series of unprecedented demonstrations across Egypt to press for the lifting of the 24-year-old state of emergency and constitutional and political reforms.
In Cairo on Tuesday an estimated 2,000 students gathered on the campus of Al-Azhar university to demand the government lift the state of emergency introduced after president Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981.
04/07/2005 17:41 GMT