Blasts hit Egypt tourist resort
2005-07-23 07:45
Sharm El-Sheik - Three car bombs exploded in quick succession in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik early on Saturday, ripping through a hotel and a coffee shop packed with European and Egyptian tourists.
"Until now, the number of killed has reached 62 and 110 wounded have been brought to the hospital in Sharm el-Sheikh," Mohammed Awad Tajeddin told the official MENA news agency.
"It is possible that the death toll will rise," he added.
Interior Minister Habib al-Adly, speaking from Sharm el-Sheikh, had said moments earlier that the death toll stood at 59.
Among the victims were eight foreigners, he said without specifying their nationalities.
It is the deadliest attack in Egypt in nearly a decade.
The powerful blasts, beginning at 01:15, rattled windows kilometres away and sent panicked holiday-goers 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 bedsheets 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, British policeman Chris Reynolds, visiting from Birmingham, England, told the BBC by telephone. "It was horrendous."
Strong blasts
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which came nine months after simultaneous bombings hit two resort further north in Sinai, killing 34 people.
One of the explosives-laden cars smashed through security into the front driveway of the Ghazala Gardens hotel and exploded.
Large swaths of the front walls of the hotel - a sprawling 176-room resort complex about three stories tall and surrounded by gardens - collapsed and burned.
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 four kilometres away where many Egyptians and others who work in the resorts live.
Three minibuses were set ablaze, though it was not clear if they were carrying passengers, the official said.
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.
A London police officer, Charlie Ives, who was on holiday, told BBC Television that he was in a street cafe about 50m 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." - AP/AFP