Multiple car bombs at Red Sea resort leave 62 dead

Three car bombs exploded in quick succession in the Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh early today, ripping through a hotel and a coffee shop packed with European and Egyptian tourists.

The government said at least 62 people died in the deadlist attack in Egypt in nearly a decade.

The reception hall of the luxury Ghazala Gardens hotel collapsed into a pancaked pile of concrete, sending terrified guests fleeing for safety, according to a journalist at the scene.

Rescue workers hours later said they feared more victims may be buried in the rubble

At least 62 people were killed, Health Minister Mohammed Awad Tag Eddin said. The interior minister earlier said 119 people were wounded and that at least eight foreigners were among the dead.

Interior Minister Habib al-Adli pinned the attack on Islamic militants. “This is an ugly act of terrorism,” al-Adli said in a statement carried on the government news agency.

“It has nothing to do with Islam, they are only acting under the slogan of Islam.”

The string of powerful blasts began at 1.15am, rattling windows miles away and raising flames and palls of smoke over 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.

Through the night, dazed tourists milled about the streets as Egyptian rescuers searched for dead and injured. Bodies of the dead lay under white bedsheets or were loaded in plastic bags into ambulances, while other emergency vehicles sped away with the wounded.

At the Ghazala, guests huddled on a back lawn near the hotel pool.

“The windows came blasting in,” said David Stewart, on holiday from Liverpool, who was with his wife and two teenage daughters. “Somebody shouted, ’Keep moving’. The lights were out. I couldn’t tell what was happening.”

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which came nine months after simultaneous bombings hit two resorts further north in Sinai, killing 34 people.

The new bombings appeared well co-ordinated, happening within minutes of each other in locations as far as 2.5 miles apart.

Al-Adli said 119 people were wounded and that at least eight foreigners were among the dead.

The dead included British, Russian, Dutch, Kuwaitis, Saudis and Qataris, a security official said.

One of the explosives-laden cars smashed through security into the front driveway of the Ghazala Gardens and detonated, said South Sinai province’s governor, Mustafa Afifi – suggesting it was a suicide bomber, though he did not specify that.

The blast tore down the reception hall and shattered windows deep into the sprawling, 176-room resort complex. Inside the hotel, bloodstains dotted the floors and tree branches and twisted metal lay flung around the grounds. As daylight came, workers were clearing debris as investigators picked through rubble.

A second car bomb exploded in a parking area near the Movenpick Hotel, also in Naama Bay, said a receptionist there.

The third detonated at a minibus park in the Old Market, an area about 2.5 miles away where many Egyptians and others who work in the resorts live. The blast ripped through a nearby outdoor coffee shop, killing 17 people, believed to be Egyptians, said a security official in the operations control room in Cairo monitoring the crisis.

“This flaming mass flew over my head, faster than a torpedo, and plunged into the water,” said Mursi Gaber, who was working on a nearby beach, putting up decorations when the blast went off. “There were body parts all over the steps down to the beach.”

More than eight hours later, an overturned shell of a minibus was still smouldering in the carpark, not far from a large crater. Pools of blood and overturned chairs littered the coffeeshop, and the facade of a nearby mall was smashed ino a windowless shell. Shards of another vehicle, apparently the one that carried the explosives, were strewn across the wide lot.

Today’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.

That was the last major terror attack in Egypt for years, until last October’s bombings at hotels in the Sinai resorts of Taba and Ras Shitan, about 100 miles northwest of Sharm on the Israel border. Egyptian authorities said that attack was linked to Israeli-Palestinian violence, and they launched a wave of arrests in Sinai.

President Hosni Mubarak has a residence in Sharm El Sheikh, 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.

Scores of ambulances from cities in the northern Sinai and the Suez Canal cities of Suez and Ismailiya were headed to Sharm to help with casualties. Doctors from the Health Ministry were boarding planes for Sharm from Cairo, where security forces were more visible in the streets

Egyptian Tourism Minister Ahmed al Maghrabi said the attacks were “meant to terrorise people and prevent them from moving and travelling”. Speaking to the Nile News Channel, he vowed 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.