A tourist and a toddler walk past a bombed store in Dahab (AP)


In 2007, for the third straight year, Egypt was ranked the number-one adventure travel destination, thanks in part to blood-pumping Jeep rides through the Sinai Desert and the underwater thrills of the Red Sea in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Unfortunately for tourists, though, some of the most hair-raising experiences in Egypt are not meant to thrill, but to terrorize.

Ten years ago, 62 tourists and tour guides were massacred at the Temple of Hatshepsut, in Luxor. In 2004, bomb attacks on hotels in the Sinai killed 34. The following year, blasts in downtown Sharm accounted for the deadliest attack in the country’s history, killing 85. Two dozen others were slaughtered in 2006 in the Red Sea resort of Dahab.

The rising bloodshed has prompted emergency evacuation company Global Rescue to offer some peace of mind when their members travel to Egypt and other countries where terrorist attacks are a perennial risk. Any time its Security Services members find themselves in imminent danger, Global Rescue will come to extract them from the situation and escort them to safety.

Previously, the company focused its efforts on medical evacuations alone. In the past five years, it had evacuated ailing severely frostbitten hikers from the Himalaya, severely ill students from West Africa, aided a hunter who had lost his vital medication in the remote Yukon, and responded to hundreds of other medical emergencies around the world.

More recently, the calls for help started to take on a different tone: An elderly woman at risk of being trapped by Russian bombs in the capital of the Georgian Republic. American executives isolated in towns throughout Lebanon during the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict. Businessmen in Chad stuck in a hotel in the capital, N’Djamena, as rebels bore down on the city.

Global Rescue fielded those calls and solved those problems for its corporate clients in the past, and now is prepared to extend those services to all of its members.