CAIRO, Egypt – Three car bombs exploded in quick succession in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik early today, ripping through a hotel and a cafe packed with European and Egyptian tourists. 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.”
Three car bombs were used in the attack, said a security official in the operations control room in Cairo monitoring the crisis. Echoes and secondary blasts had initially led witnesses and police to believe there had been as many as seven explosions.
One blast went off in the driveway of the Ghazala Gardens hotel, a 176-room four-star resort on the main strip of hotels in Naama Bay, said the governor of South Sinai province, Mustafa Afifi.
The Ghazala’s front reception area was “completely burned down, destroyed,” Amal Mustafa, 28, an Egyptian who was visiting Sharm with her family, told The Associated Press after driving by the site.
Footage of the hotel, a sprawling complex mostly three stories high, showed large swaths of the walls 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 2½ miles away, killing 17 people – believed to be Egyptians – sitting at a nearby outdoor coffee shop, the control room official said. 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.
Province governors put the toll at 49 killed and around 200 wounded. The Interior Ministry put out a statement putting the toll at 31 people and 107 wounded.
The dead included British, Russian, Dutch, Kuwaitis, Saudis, Qataris and Egyptians, a security official said. The officials, including the one in the crisis control center, were speaking on condition of anonymity because they were giving information not yet included in the official statement.
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.
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