Dozens Die in Egypt Blasts

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. Security officials said at least 45 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. Ambulances sped away with victims.

“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.”

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 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 was “completely burned down, destroyed,” said Amal Mustafa, 28, an Egyptian who was visiting Sharm with her family. Television video of the hotel, a three-story complex, showed parts of the building burned out with walls collapsed.

A second 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, the control room official said. Three minibuses were set ablaze. It was not clear if they were carrying passengers, he 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 Said, 35, a Sudanese man who lives in the Old Market.

Security officials put the toll in Saturday’s explosions at 45 dead and about 200 wounded. The Interior Ministry put out a statement putting the toll at 31 dead and 107 wounded.

Although many tourists could have been asleep when the explosions struck, the resort’s sidewalk cafes, seafront restaurants and bazaars are usually packed with locals and tourists well into the late summer nights.

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, was linked to Israeli-Palestinian violence.

The dead in the Sharm blasts included Britons, Russians, Dutch, Kuwaitis, Saudis, Qataris and Egyptians, an official said. The officials, including the security official in Cairo, were speaking on condition of anonymity because they were giving information not yet included in the official statement.

President Hosni Mubarak has a residence at a resort several miles outside Naama Bay. British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his family have come to Sharm el Sheik to spend the Christmas holiday.

A London police officer, Charlie Ives, who was on vacation, told BBC Television that he was in a cafe about 50 yards from two of the explosions.

“It was mass hysteria, really,” he said. “We tried to calm people down.” 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 blast, then a larger one.

“We went outside onto 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 were on the way to help with casualties.

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.

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.

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.

“This is a catastrophe, a terrible catastrophe,” said Osama Sebai, a construction manager at the nearby Aida Hotel. “The strikes hit the city before the start of our season. We expect massive cancellations.”

AP’s Sarah El Deeb, Paul Garwood, Nadia Abou El-Magd and Salah Nasrawi in Cairo; and The Times’ Megan K. Stack in Cairo, Hossam el Hamalawy in London contributed to this report.