November 17: On This Day in World History … briefly
Most of the victims were foreign tourists. Switzerland was hardest hit, with 36 of its citizens killed. The youngest victim was a 5-year-old British child.
1997: 62 people killed by Islamic militants in Luxor, Egypt
The Luxor massacre was the killing of 62 people, mostly tourists, on 17 November 1997, at Deir el-Bahari, an archaeological site and major tourist attraction across the Nile from Luxor, Egypt. It is thought to have been instigated by exiled leaders of al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, an Egyptian Islamist organization, attempting to undermine the July 1997 ‘Nonviolence Initiative’, to devastate the Egyptian economy and provoke the government into repression that would strengthen support for anti-government forces. However, the attack led to internal divisions among the militants, and resulted in the declaration of a ceasefire. In June 2013, the group denied that it was involved in the massacre.
Deir el-Bahari is one of Egypt’s top tourist attractions, notable for the spectacular Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, an 18th dynasty pharaoh known also as Djeser-Djeseru. In the mid-morning attack, six gunmen killed 58 foreign nationals and four Egyptians. The assailants were armed with automatic firearms and knives, and disguised as members of the security forces. They descended on the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut and killed two armed guards at the site. With the tourists trapped inside the temple, the killing went on systematically for 45 minutes, during which many bodies, especially of women, were mutilated with machetes. A note praising Islam was found inside a disemboweled body. The dead included a five-year-old British child, Shaunnah Turner, and four Japanese couples on honeymoon.
The attackers then hijacked a bus, but ran into a checkpoint of armed Egyptian National Police and military forces. One of the terrorists was wounded in the subsequent shootout and the rest fled into the hills where their bodies were found in a cave, apparently having committed suicide together. One or more al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya leaflets were reportedly found calling for the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman from US prison, stating that the attack had been carried out as a gesture to exiled leader Mustafa Hamza, or declaring: “We shall take revenge for our brothers who have died on the gallows. The depths of the earth are better for us than the surface since we have seen our brothers squatting in their prisons, and our brothers and families tortured in their jails.”
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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