Egypt attacks: Two police officers shot dead by unidentified gunmen near Pyramids of Giza in Cairo

It came after tourists were stabbed at a Red Sea resort and another hotel was attacked in Cairo

Several police officers have been murdered near Giza in the past year (AFP/Getty Images)

Two Egyptian police officers have been shot dead in Cairo as they made their way to work near the Pyramids of Giza.

The Interior Ministry published pictures of the two men on its Facebook page, saying they had been travelling through the district in their car.

“Immediately after the incident several moving and fixed checkpoints were deployed in the Muneeb area in order to crack down on the attackers and catch them,” a security source was quoted as saying by the state news agency.

(إستشهاد عقيد ومجند شرطة بشبرا منت بالجيزة.. إثر قيام مجهولون بإطلاق النار عليهما حال توجهما لجهة العمل)صرح مسئول مركز ...

Posted by ‎الصفحة الرسمية لوزارة الداخلية‎ on Saturday, 9 January 2016

The gunmen were not identified and there was no immediate claim of responsibility.

It is not the first time police have been targeted in Giza, which lies south-west of central Cairo and houses the world-famous Ancient Egyptian pyramids.

On 28 November, masked men riding a motorbike shot four police officers dead between the Giza and Saqqara pyramids.

Isis’ Egyptian affiliate claimed responsibility for that attack but not for a previous shooting that killed two police officer guarding tourists in Giza on 3 June last year.

Tourists leave the Bella Vista Hotel following the attack (EPA)

Saturday’s shootings came after two men attacked a hotel in the Red Sea resort of Hurghada, wounding two Austrians and a Swede before one was shot dead and the other detained.

Witnesses reported seeing the assailants waving an Isis flag but representatives of the Bella Vista resort called the rumours “nonsense” and blamed “drugged young men” for the incident.

Their injuries were not serious and all three victims were expected to be discharged from hospital by the end of today.

Hisham Zazou, Egypt’s tourism minister, was travelling to visit the affected tourists as he sought to play down the incident.

“If someone wants to claim that this is part of a terrorist group, it is a bit amateurish for that,” he was quoted as saying by AFP.

“They used only knives. If someone wants to attempt really to create a terrible incident, he would not be using a knife.”

Isis claimed responsibility for a separate attack on the Three Pyramids Hotel in Cairo on Thursday, where no one was injured.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has declared war on Islamist militants who have launched suicide bombings and shootings across the country.

Egypt’s most active terrorist group, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, pledged allegiance to Isis in 2014 and started calling itself Wilayat Sinai.

Its jihadists are mainly active in the Sinai Peninsula, where they claimed to have bombed a Russian passenger plane with 224 people on board in October, and have also claimed responsibility for attacks in Cairo, the western desert and Nile delta.

Additional reporting by agencies