Author: Lee Keath
Publication: Associated Press
Date: July 22, 2005
Three car bombs exploded in quick
succession in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik early Saturday, ripping
through a hotel and a cafe packed with European and Egyptian tourists.
The province governor said at least 49 people died in the deadliest attack
in Egypt in nearly a decade.
The powerful blasts, beginning at
1:15 a.m., rattled windows miles away and sent panicked vacationers streaming
out of hotels and clubs. Smoke and fire rose from Naama Bay, a main strip
of beach hotels in the desert city at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula,
also popular with Israeli tourists, witnesses said.
Dazed tourists milled about the
darkened streets as Egyptian rescuers searched for dead and injured. Bodies
of the dead lay under white sheets or were loaded in plastic bags into
ambulances, while other emergency vehicles sped away with the wounded.
"There seemed to be a lot of bodies
strewn across the road" near one cafe, Chris Reynolds, a policeman visiting
from Birmingham, England, told the BBC by telephone. "It was horrendous."
One of the explosives-laden cars
smashed through security into the front driveway of the Ghazala Gardens
hotel and exploded, said South Sinai province's governor, Mustafa Afifi
- suggesting it was a suicide bomber, though he did not specify that.
Large swaths of the front walls
of the hotel - a sprawling 176-room resort complex about three stories
tall and surrounded by gardens - were collapsed and burned. The reception
area was "completely burned down, destroyed," Amal Mustafa, 28, an Egyptian
visiting Sharm with her family, told The Associated Press after driving
by the site.
A second car bomb exploded in a
parking area near the Movenpick Hotel, also in Naama Bay, said a receptionist
there who declined to identify himself.
The third detonated at a minibus
parking lot in the Old Market, an area about 2 1/2 miles away, killing
17 people - believed to be Egyptians - sitting at a nearby outdoor coffee
shop, said a security official in the operations control room in Cairo
monitoring the crisis. Three minibuses were set ablaze. It was not clear
if they were carrying passengers, the official said.
After the blast, "I went to my balcony
and saw fire and smoke rising from the car that exploded, which was a taxi,"
said Ibrahim al-Said, 35, a Sudanese man who lives in the Old Market.
Afifi, speaking to the state news
agency, put the toll at 49 killed. Security officials said around 200 were
wounded. They - like the crisis control room official - spoke on condition
of anonymity because they were releasing information not yet announced
by the Interior Ministry. The ministry's toll stood at 31 dead and 107
wounded.
The control room official had initially
said as many as seven blasts may have gone off, four of them car bombs,
but he later corrected that report, saying witnesses and police had been
thrown off by echoes and secondary blasts.
The dead included British, Russian,
Dutch, Kuwaitis, Saudis, Qataris and Egyptians, a security official said.
The attacks came nine months after
a series of explosions hit several hotels in the Sinai resorts of Taba
and Ras Shitan, about 100 miles northwest on the Israel border. Egyptian
authorities said that attack, which killed 34 and prompted a wave of arrests
in Sinai, was linked to Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Saturday's bombings were the deadliest
since 1997, when Islamic militants killed 58 foreign tourists and four
Egyptians at the Pharaonic Temple of Hatshepsut outside Luxor in southern
Egypt.
President Hosni Mubarak has a residence
in Sharm el-Sheik, at a resort several miles outside Naama Bay and often
spends weeks there at a time in the winter. But during the summer, he stays
at a residence in the
northern city of Alexandria.
A London police officer, Charlie
Ives, who was on vacation, told BBC Television that he was in a street
cafe about 50 meters away from where two explosions went off.
"It was mass hysteria really. We
tried to calm people down," he said. He said the blast was so strong, "We
were virtually thrown from the cafe."
Another British tourist, Fabio Basone,
was in Naama Bay's Hard Rock Cafe when he heard a small explosion, then
a larger one.
"We went outside on to the street
where we were met with hundreds of people running and screaming in all
directions," he told BBC. "I saw the front of a hotel had been blown away.
... There were two bodies on the floor but I don't know if they were dead."
Scores of ambulances from cities
from the northern Sinai were headed to Sharm to help. Doctors from the
Health Ministry were boarding planes for Sharm from Cairo.
Kurtis Cooper, a State Department
spokesman, said the United States condemned the attacks and offered assistance
to the Egyptian government.
"There can be no excuse for the
targeting of innocent civilians," Cooper said.
Egyptian Tourism Minister Ahmed
al Maghrabi said the attacks were "meant to terrorize people and prevent
them from moving and traveling." Speaking to the Nile News Channel, he
said they would not hurt Egypt's crucial tourism industry.
Thousands of tourists are drawn
to Sharm for its sun, clear blue water and coral reefs. It also has been
a meeting place where world leaders have tried to hammer out a Mideast
peace agreement. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian leader
Mahmoud Abbas met there in February and agreed to a cease-fire.
AP correspondents Sarah El Deeb,
Paul Garwood, Nadia Abou El-Magd and Salah Nasrawi in Cairo contributed
to this report.