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Blasts Rock Egyptian Resort, Killing at Least 49
Witness Says One Hotel Was 'Completely Burned Down, Destroyed'
By LEE KEATH, AP
CAIRO, Egypt (July 23) - 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.
Reaction to the Egypt Bombings
Source: ESRI / AP"There seemed to be a lot of bodies strewn across the road."
-- Chris Reynolds, British Policeman
"[The Ghazala was] completely burned down, destroyed."
-- Amal Mustafa, a visiting Egyptian
''It was mass hysteria really. We tried to calm people down. We were virtually thrown from the cafe.''
-- Charlie Ives, a vacationing London police officer
"There can be no excuse for the targeting of innocent civilians."
-- Kurtis Cooper, a State Department spokesman,
Sources: AP
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 ****an, 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.
07-22-05 23:37 EDT
