Published on : Saturday, August 25, 2018
John Cooper, 69, and his wife Susan Cooper, a 63-year old who worked for the holiday company in Britain, were staying at the Steigenberger Aqua Magic Hotel and died within hours of each other on Tuesday.
Thomas Cook said it had received further reports of illness among guests, without elaborating. The incident comes as Egypt is trying to revive tourism, a crucial source of income, while the economy is still struggling from the years of turmoil. A statement from the Red Sea provincial governor’s office, entitled “normal death of an English old man and his wife”, said both had died of heart failure.
John Cooper suffered a “circulatory collapse” and died at the hotel. Susan Cooper was taken to hospital after fainting and died there, it said. The couple’s daughter Kelly Ormerod, who was on the same holiday along with her three children, said the cause of death had not been established.
One morning, the man, a 69-year-old English builder, collapses in his hotel room in front of his wife and daughter and is pronounced dead. Hours later his wife, 64, is taken to a hospital where she, too, dies.
The Egyptian authorities insist the couple, seen in pictures as tanned, smiling and healthy-looking, have died from natural causes. But other guests at the hotel complain of upset stomachs from bad food. And their daughter, who was with them during their final hours, says she believes “something suspicious” happened.
The hotel management denied that there was an unusual level of sickness, and, like Egyptian officials, insisted that the couple from Lancashire — where Ms. Cooper worked at a Thomas Cook branch — had died from natural causes. But by Friday evening, about half of the 301 guests had been flown out of Egypt, and the remainder had moved to nearby resorts, a Thomas Cook spokeswoman said.
However, about 1,600 other guests remained in Red Sea resort of Hurghada, said Sally Khattab, the hotel’s marketing director. She added that the hotel had recently passed a Thomas Cook audit with flying colors. This evacuation was a major blow to Egypt’s tourism industry which, despite a modest upswing this year, is struggling to recover from years of political turmoil, plane crashes and Islamist violence that had caused a steep drop in visitors since 2010.
Tags: china, Egypt’s Red Sea resort, Hotel, Tourism news