"Egyptian forces kill Mexican tourists" New York Times September 14, 2015
Egyptian security forces opened fire on a caravan of tourist vehicles in the country’s Western Desert late Sunday night, killing at least 12 people visiting from Mexico and injuring 10 others, among them Mexican tourists and their Egyptian tour guides, officials said.
The tourists were killed by a “joint force from the police and armed forces” who were pursuing “terrorist elements” in an area of the desert, according to a brief statement posted to the official Facebook page of Egypt’s Interior Ministry. The episode happened around midnight, security officials said.
“The incident resulted in the deaths of 12 people and the injury of 10 people from among the Mexicans and the Egyptians,” the statement said. “They have been taken to hospitals for treatment.”
The security forces said they had believed the vehicles were being used to transport terrorists. The statement said the group had been driving in a restricted area where unauthorized access is banned.
If you are killed by security forces it is always your own fault (in friendly and allied countries, not the bad ones). I know it's tough to get down, but....
The tourists were traveling in a group of four sport utility vehicles in an area roughly 30 miles from Bahariya Oasis, security officials said.
The oasis, a verdant desert outpost, is about 230 miles south of Cairo, and is a popular stop for groups on desert tours.
Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, called the killings tragic and demanded Sunday on Twitter that Egypt investigate them thoroughly.
“I deeply regret that our countrymen lost their lives,” he said.
I'm thinking your countrymen (and women) were looking for more than that regarding lives that were taken, not lost.
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"Egyptian military fired on tourists during picnic, witnesses say; Deaths in Egypt likely to hurt ailing tourist industry" by Merna Thomas New York Times September 15, 2015
CAIRO — The mistaken airstrike by the Egyptian military that killed a dozen people on a Mexican tourist trip in the Western Desert hit at a picnic in the middle of the day, witnesses said Monday, raising new questions about both the extent of the error and the official explanations.
The convoy of four sport utility vehicles was about three hours southwest of Cairo on a typical tourist trip through the White Desert, an unearthly Western Desert area of chalk rocks, about midday Sunday when a diabetic passenger complained that she needed to eat, according to a tour guide official, witnesses and others briefed on the events.
So, with the blessing of their police escort and the added security of an Apache military helicopter buzzing on the horizon, the Egyptian guide and his four drivers pulled about 1 mile off the road to prepare a meal.
It was then that the helicopter opened fire, killing at least a dozen people — including at least two visiting Mexicans — while wounding a tourist policeman and at least 10 others.
Some were gunned down as they tried to flee toward the top of a nearby sand dune, said Essam Monem, a resident of the area who arrived that night and saw the bodies in the sand.
The helicopter crew had mistaken the tourist picnic for a camp of Islamist militants operating in the area, the Interior Ministry said in a statement early Monday. But the accident has nonetheless killed more tourists than any terrorist attack in recent years.
Analysts say it has threatened to do new damage to Egypt’s already crippled tourist industry by raising questions about both the competence of the security forces and the prevalence of the militants they were attempting to hunt.
I'm sure the Mexicans are concerned about that.
“What we saw was not just the lack of training of the military forces but also their desperation,” said Mokhtar Awad, a researcher at the Center for American Progress who tracks Egyptian militant groups, noting that Islamic State militants in the area had also released photographs Sunday that appeared to show they had beaten back an army unit in battle earlier the same day.
Initial reports Sunday night from Egyptian security officials had said that the error took place late at night, when mistaking tourists for militants might be less hard to imagine.
The government knee-jerked a lie?
In its statement Monday, the Interior Ministry sought instead to blame the tour guides, suggesting that the convoy had entered a “banned area” without permission.
A Mexican tourist group “was present in the same banned area” as a group of “terrorist elements” that the military and police forces had been chasing, the ministry’s statement said. It also said a team had been formed to look into “the reasons and circumstances of the accident and the justifications for the presence of the tourist group in the aforementioned banned area.”
But the official union of tour guides and friends of the trip’s leader, who was killed in the attack, circulated photographs of the convoy’s official permit on the Internet. Union officials and friends of the guide said the tour had stuck to a common, widely used tourist route, passed through several police checkpoints, and moved only with the approval of its tourist police escort.
The group had “no information that this region is banned, no warning signs, and no instructions from checkpoints on the road, or the Tourism & Antiquities policeman present with them,” Hassan el-Nahla, chairman of the General Union of Tourist Guides, said in a statement.
Oooooops!
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"Egypt bans news coverage of killings of Mexican tourists" New York Times September 17, 2015
CAIRO — Egypt’s chief prosecutor issued a ban on news media coverage in the case of an attack by security forces that killed 12 people, including eight Mexican tourists and their Egyptian guides, during the weekend.
The ban, issued Wednesday night, came after Egypt’s foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, promised a “prompt, thorough, and transparent investigation” into the killings, according to a joint statement with Mexico’s foreign minister, Claudia Ruiz Massieu.
Critics said the order could be part of an attempt to conceal the findings of any investigation into the killings.
The government needs to find out “what really happened over there and basically not be embarrassed by what the investigation might bring — information confirming the role of the army in this sad event,” said Mohamed Lotfy, the director of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, an independent watchdog group.
The government said this week that the crew of a helicopter gunship fired on the tourists after mistaking them for a group of insurgents in Egypt’s Western Desert.
The order applies to both domestic and international media, including print, online, and broadcast news, according to a statement from the prosecutor’s office.
I suppose this post will be blocked in Egypt.
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Haven't seen another word of it in my Globe, either.
At least Mexicans got to see the report on TV:
"Mexico Government Gives Free TVs to Millions of Poor … With High Definition Social Programming
By Aaron Dykes
August 16, 2015
For better or for worse, television has been how many see the world.
It is a “mediated” experience that shows the viewer exactly what the programmer wants him to see…and believe.
Television has been a remarkable tool of manipulation and indoctrination, and....
Dropping the word “mind control” naturally turns some people off from the discussion. But this is exactly what television and many other electronic formats are capable of.
In particular, researchers like CIA experimenter José M. Delgado have proven that the electromagnetic frequency waves emitted silently and invisibly from televisions, power lines and other electronic devices have the power to “entrain the brain” through very low power waves that can literally alter brain function and resynchronize human and animal brains – tuned to the natural background frequency of the earth itself.
This in turn creates a physiological connection to the TV or device that makes viewers more susceptible to believe or trust news anchors, actors, advertisers, and editorial boards. OMNI Magazine wrote in depth on Delgado back in 1985:
Remarkably, these EMFs are several hundred times below the voltage needed for an electrode to trigger a nerve to fire. According to theory, they should have no impact. Yet when Delgado aims these fields at an isolated crab neuron already firing at a specific, steady rate, something surprising happens: The neuron changes its firing rate to synchronize with the applied pulses, much as a child sleeping with his mother will begin breathing at the same rate as the parent. This phenomenon is known as entrainment.
Researchers have observed similar entrainment effects in the neurons of -the cerebral cortices of live animals… the brain waves of monkeys tend to become “locked” in phase with external fields tuned to the same frequency band as the brain waves.
For example, if the. animal’s head is placed in a field pulsing at the same rhythm as alpha — a natural brain rhythm associated with relaxation in humans — its brain will start to produce more and more alpha. And when the animal’s brain waves become entrained to fields pulsing at other brain-wave frequencies, subtle behavioral changes are sometimes detected.
Catherine Austin Fitts, a whistleblower who once worked on Wall Street and in the George H.W. Bush Administration, expressed her horror at overhearing high-level executives discuss the entrainment features being floated for television broadcasts back in the mid 1980s.
Television today can carry messages that are not heard or seen at all by the viewer, even with a careful eye looking for it. It is carried in a pattern under the regularly scheduled broadcast…nothing is lost, and everything is gained – for those crafting the messages....
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Time to bury the bodies:
"Mexico’s probe of 43 missing students rejected" by E. Eduardo Castillo Associated Press September 07, 2015
MEXICO CITY — An independent report has called into question the Mexican government’s investigation into last year’s disappearance of 43 college students, saying the attorney general’s assertion that their bodies were burned in a giant funeral pyre was false.
While the government said the Sept. 26 attack was a case of mistaken identity, the report said it was a violent and coordinated reaction to the students, who were hijacking buses for transportation to a demonstration and may have unknowingly interfered with a drug shipment on one of the buses.
Iguala, the city in southern Guerrero state where the attacks took place, is known as a transport hub for heroin going to the United States, particularly Chicago, some of it by bus, the report said.
‘‘The business that moves the city of Iguala could explain such an extreme and violent reaction and the character of the massive attack,’’ the experts said in the report, delivered Sunday to the government and the students’ families during a public presentation, where some started chanting ‘‘It was the state!’’
The report means that nearly a year after the disappearance, the fate of 42 of the students remains a mystery, given the errors, omissions, and false conclusions outlined in more than 400 pages by the experts assembled by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
Only a charred bone fragment of one of the 43 has been identified and it wasn’t burned at the high temperature of an incineration, contrary to Mexican investigators’ claims.
‘‘We have no evidence to support where the disappeared are,’’ said Carlos Beristain, a Spanish medical doctor on the team.
The report recommends that authorities rethink their assumptions and lines of investigation, as well as continue the search for the students and investigate the possible use of public or private ovens to cremate the bodies. It also recommends an investigation into the possible drug angle and into who was coordinating the attacks and the high-level people giving the orders — all unknowns.
President Enrique Pena Nieto said via Twitter that he has told investigators to take into account the findings of the report, which dealt another blow to the Mexican government in a case that has sparked international outrage and protests.
That's why they were on the march.
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