ed Bomb attack on tourists

Insufficient preventive measures from the government, coupled with an indifferent attitude among tourists to safety, have resulted in victims of terrorism again in what may have been a suicide bomb attack aimed at wrecking Egypt’s already moribund tourism industry.

A bomb ripped through a bus filled with Korean tourists in the Sinai Peninsula on Sunday, killing three Koreans and an Egyptian driver. The first attack against tourists in Sinai in a decade injured 14 others.

The tourists were all members of a church in Jincheon, North Chungcheong Province, on a 12-day pilgrimage through Turkey, Egypt and Israel. They had set off from Cairo and were waiting at the crossing to enter Israel when the explosion occurred.

It was consoling though that the bomb blasted in the front part of the bus. Otherwise, there would have been far more casualties.

Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, an al-Qaida-linked armed Islamist group, reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack, but the report has not been confirmed yet. The explosion appears not to have targeted Korean tourists, but some analysts raise the possibility that it might have been a premeditated attack on tourists from one of America’s allies.

Terrorism can never be justified under any circumstances and such inhumane and unethical acts should be weeded out by all means, as our Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho Tae-young said in a statement. No doubt, the international community should cooperate to stop terror attacks on innocent civilians.

The ministry immediately dispatched officials to the terror site to assess the situation and issued a special travel advisory for the Sinai Peninsula, one of the most frequently visited destinations by Korean tourists, calling on its nationals to withdraw from the region immediately. But it was no more useful than a prescription after death.

It’s also dumbfounding that most Korean tourists were reportedly unaware of the fact that the Sinai Peninsula was an area where travel must be restricted because of possible safety concerns. No wonder then that there are suspicions that the travel agency may have kept it secret on purpose.

Even more surprising is that many travel companies have been selling similar tourism products even after the bomb attack. We can’t overestimate the danger of terrorism in the Middle East and northern Africa, given that as many as 65 Koreans have been kidnapped in these areas since the Iraq War ended in 2003.

The latest tragedy should serve as a wake-up call for our government to come up with more stringent preventive measures. Tourists, for their part, need to give top priority to ensuring safety while refraining from travelling to dangerous zones.