Governments, firms evacuating tourists from Egypt

BEIJING (Reuters) - Governments and tour operators took steps on Monday to pull their nationals out of Egypt on chartered or scheduled flights as protesters pressed their campaign to topple President Hosni Mubarak.

Two Chinese airlines, Air China and Hainan Air, said they would each send a chartered flight to Cairo on Monday to bring home Chinese citizens. There were at least 500 Chinese nationals stuck at Cairo's international airport, a Chinese consular official in Cairo told Reuters by telephone.

It was not immediately clear how smoothly evacuation flights would go. Witnesses reported scenes of chaos at Cairo Airport on Sunday, with many people, including Egyptians, scrambling to get on a decreasing number of scheduled flights.

Japan's Foreign Ministry said chartered aircraft would fly about 500 citizens stranded at Cairo airport to Rome. But the exact number was unclear as Kyodo news agency said 335 people had boarded an Egyptair flight to Japan overnight.

Germany's Foreign Ministry issued a travel warning late on Sunday for Cairo, Alexandria and Suez, but described the situation at Red Sea resorts as calm for the moment.

German tour operator Rewe advised customers booked on holidays to Egypt over the next week to cancel to relieve pressure on the country's infrastructure.

The company, which has 3,100 customers in Egypt at present, said it had cancelled all holidays and trips to Cairo until February 7, although customers in Red Sea resorts should be able to continue their holidays as planned.

CONTINGENCY PLANS

Officials in Turkey and Cyprus said they were making contingency plans to receive tourists evacuated from Egypt.

U.S.-based Delta Air Lines Inc said on Friday it was suspending its service into Cairo indefinitely.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Janice Jacobs said U.S.-government sponsored flights would be leaving Cairo on Monday.

Turkey said it was sending two Turkish Airlines planes to Egypt to evacuate Turkish nationals, while Greece said it had military aircraft on standby to bring home Greeks.

Other countries advised their citizens to leave Egypt or avoid travelling to major cities. The U.S. State Department moved to reduce diplomatic staff in Egypt, authorising the voluntary departure of diplomats and non-essential workers.

Egypt's tourism industry, which provides about one in eight jobs, took a hit in 1997 when gunmen killed 58 tourists and four Egyptians at an ancient temple in Luxor, and after the September 11, 2001, attacks. But dips in tourist numbers have previously been temporary, and the trend has been broadly upward for a decade.

Some European and Asian companies started evacuating staff.

Two Japanese firms shut down operations, Nissan Motor Co. at a plant in Giza, near the capital, and a subsidiary in the Cairo suburbs of drugmaker Otsuka Holdings.

Oil company Royal Dutch Shell planned to evacuate about 60 families of its international staff from Egypt as a safety measure, a source close to the company told Reuters.

One of Europe's largest retailers, Germany's Metro, said two of its stores in Egypt had been looted, with one being set on fire. It has recommended its 700 employees in the country to stay at home and is helping some international employees return to their home countries.

Nokia Siemens Networks spokeswoman Riitta Mard told Reuters the firm, which has 400 employees in Egypt, had started to evacuate its foreign employees and their families from Egypt to Dubai.

Most of the estimated 40,000 Russians vacationing in Egypt, mainly at Red Sea resorts, had no plans to cut short their trips, the acting head of the Russian Federal Tourism Agency, Alexander Radkov, told Interfax news agency on Saturday.

"The situation in Egyptian resorts remains calm ... People do not want to interrupt their holiday," he said.

(Additional reporting by international bureaux; Writing by Ron Popeski; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

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