Swede to return home after Cairo suicide bomb

Tobias Johansson, the 28 year old Swede injured in Saturday's suicide bomb attack in Cairo, is set to return to Sweden today. He suffered extensive injuries to his hands and face as well as serious eye injuries.

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Johansson underwent a five hour operation at Cairo's university hospital on Saturday night to save his sight. Sweden's ambassador to Egypt, Stig Elvemar, visited him in hospital on Sunday and reported his prospects were good:

"His sight has returned in one eye, and according to the doctors I've spoken to there's good reason to believe he'll recover fully."

Johansson was with his 26 year old Italian fiancée in a crowd of people near a bus stop in the vicinity of the popular Egyptian Museum, when Ihab Yusri Yassin threw himself off a bridge and plunged towards the bus stop. He detonated a nail bomb strapped to his body, killing himself and injuring up to ten people.

Johansson, who's an aid worker in the war-torn region of Dafur in Sudan and was in Cairo on a week's holiday, spoke to Aftonbladet yesterday about what happened. The paper reported that he was in surprisingly good spirits considering his experience.

"Everything happened incredibly quickly. Luckily, I didn't see the actual blast. If I had, I wouldn't be able to see today. First of all I just heard a loud bang to my left. Then everything went muffled and quiet, as if I was deaf. Then I heard a ringing in my head. I couldn't see anything. I tried to find my girlfriend. I screamed out for her and heard her voice in the distance."

Once re-united, Johansson and his girlfriend, Francesca Catelani, sat and waited for the ambulance together. Catelani received injuries from a nail in her neck.

"I felt the blood dripping from my face from the nails," continued Johansson. "My girlfriend said that I looked absolutely awful."

An hour after the nail bomb attack, Yassin's young wife and sister opened fire on a coach full of Israeli tourists. The sister then shot her sister in law before turning the gun on herself. Nobody else was killed in the attack.

Sources: Svenska Dagbladet, Aftonbladet