Cairo Blast Toll Includes an American

CAIRO — An American tourist died Friday of wounds suffered a day earlier when a bomb blast rocked a bazaar popular with foreigners, raising the death toll to three, officials said.

Three other Americans were among 18 people injured in the explosion in Cairo’s old city, which also killed a French woman and an unidentified man that police said may have been the bomber.

The explosion in the bazaar near Al Azhar Mosque was the first such attack in the city in seven years. Prime Minister Ahmed Nazief said the attack may have been carried out by an assailant working alone; witnesses said the bomb appeared to have been detonated by a man on a motorcycle. Nazief stressed, however, that an investigation was continuing.

“Initial evidence is that it was an individual act. The way in which the explosive was prepared was very primitive,” the prime minister said after visiting victims at a hospital.

Many of the injured, who included Egyptians, French and a Turk, suffered severe wounds from nails packed in the bomb.

Hundreds of police sealed off a 400-yard stretch of road lined by run-down warehouses and stores where the blast took place, as investigators interviewed shop owners for clues.

Police said they had taken in two people for questioning.

A previously unknown group, calling itself the Al-Ezz Islamic Brigades, claimed responsibility, saying the attack was a message to President Hosni Mubarak that Islamic militancy still existed in his country.