Tribesmen held over Egyptian bombings

Dozens of Bedouin tribesmen have been detained on suspicion that they supplied the explosives for car bombings at two Egyptian resorts that killed at least 32 people, most of them Israelis, officials said today.

Israel’s counter-terrorism chief, meanwhile, said Israeli tourists in Egypt are still in danger and urged them return home immediately.

At the Taba Hilton, scene of the deadliest blast, investigators searched the rubble for a lead on the identities of the attackers.

Israeli officials have said they believed the al Qaida terror network was most likely to be behind the attack, while Egyptian officials said it was too early to point to suspects.

Fingerprints were lifted from the car bomb, which had been packed with 200 kilos (440 pounds) of explosives, and DNA samples were taken from nearby body parts to determine whether suicide bombers drove the vehicle.

Three car bombs exploded Thursday night, one at the Taba Hilton just south of the Egypt-Israel border and two at a bungalow beach camp further south along the Red Sea coast.

Two bodies, including that of a toddler, were pulled out of the twisted wreckage of the hotel Saturday, the Israeli military said.

The blast had brought down a 10-storey wing of the resort.

Egyptian and Israeli rescuers used everything from pneumatic drills to dogs and bare hands to search the wreckage.

Blood-stained floors, walls and even ceilings, and trees around the hotel were filled with the bodies of charred birds.

Dan Arditi, head of Israel’s counter-terrorism agency, said Saturday that Israeli tourists in the Sinai Peninsula are still in danger, and urged them to come home immediately. Thursday’s attacks “don’t lessen, even in the slightest, the risk that this will happen again,” he told Israel Radio.

Arditi’s agency last month urged Israelis not to travel to the Sinai, saying it had concrete warnings about a possible terror attack.

Israel’s government had never before issued such a severe travel advisory, but thousands of Israelis ignored it and spent the Jewish holiday period, which began in mid-September, in Sinai resorts.

Many Israelis considered the desert peninsula a safe place to get away from their country, which has been hit by scores of Palestinian suicide bombings in the past four years of fighting.

After Thursday’s attacks, thousands of frightened Israeli tourists returned home, but others remained.

“I recommend that Israeli citizens who are still in the Sinai come back, as quickly as possible,” Arditi said today, suggesting that it is possible the attackers his agency had warned about a month ago were not those who carried out Thursday’s bombings.

Israeli security sources said the warnings a month ago apparently referred to Palestinian militants trying to sneak out of Gaza, which borders on the Sinai. The peninsula is the main weapons smuggling route for Palestinian militants.