Because I figured there'd be a thread already but there isn't here it is.
The news is that an Egyptian Resort was bombed yesterday. 3 bombs. 2 car bombs and one bag of explosives beside a walk that was apparently popular for tourists and pedestrians. 88 confirmed dead so far.
PANICKED TOURISTS RUSH OUT OF EGYPTBlasts at resort reinforce fears
militants can strike anywhere
SARAH EL DEEB
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt—Egypt launched a massive hunt yesterday for those responsible for three bombs that killed at least 88 people in this Red Sea resort packed with European and Arab vacationers.
At hotels across Sharm el-Sheikh last night, lobbies were jammed with tourists with their baggage, eager to leave. At the nearby international airport, foreigners lined up, with hundreds of Italians trying to get flights out. Some were prepared to wait overnight in the airport rather than stay at hotels.
"I wanted to stay for all the summer, but now I'm going home," said 27-year-old Stefano Alquati from Rimini, Italy, who travels each year to this resort at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. "It's not good to stay here. ... Sharm el-Sheikh is finished, the business and all. I saw the panic."
Egyptian investigators said they were trying to determine whether foreigners carried out the string of explosions that levelled the reception area of a luxury tourist hotel and ripped apart a coffee house crowded with Egyptians at 1:15 a.m.
No direct link was seen between the devastating blasts in Sharm el-Sheikh and the two rounds of explosions that recently hit London's subway and buses, but together the attacks reinforced a global fear that militants can strike anywhere.
Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt's largest resort area, has long felt like an oasis of safety, known equally for partying, scuba diving and high-level political summits.
But last October, 34 people were killed in attacks on two other Sinai resorts at Taba and Ras Shitan, 200 kilometres north of Sharm el-Sheikh.
There were conflicting claims of responsibility for the Sharm el-Sheikh bombings — one from an Al Qaeda-linked group, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, and the other from a previously unknown and apparently local group, the Holy Warriors of Egypt.
Most of the 88 dead were Egyptians, but Britons, Dutch, Kuwaitis, Qataris, Saudis, Czechs, Germans and Italians reportedly also were killed in the blasts. At least 240 others were injured.
It could be some time before all the victims are known. Dozens of bodies were charred beyond recognition.
The attacks were well co-ordinated. Car bombs — apparently driven by suicide attackers — detonated almost simultaneously at the 176-room luxury Ghazala Gardens hotel in Sharm el-Sheikh's main strip of Naama Bay and also three kilometres away in a minibus lot in the Old Market, ravaging a coffee shop frequented by Egyptians who work at the area's resorts.
In the third attack, a bomb might have been hidden in a bag and left at a taxi stand where frightened tourists had dashed after the first bombs went off.
At the Ghazala Gardens, a bomber drove a small truck packed with 300 kilograms of explosives through a plate-glass window and into the lobby. The entire entrance of the building was destroyed.
Muhammad Mansour, 28, who was visiting from a neighbouring hotel, told The New York Times a guard was chasing the truck into the lobby and shouting: "This is a terrorist. Call the police."
`Blood started coming out from my head and legs. But I kept running'
Muhammad Mansour, who escaped when a bomber's truck crashed into a hotel lobby
The truck stopped in the middle of the lobby, between the shattered entrance and a glass wall overlooking the swimming pool.
After freezing for several seconds, Mansour said he raced out the front of the hotel. Seconds later he felt the powerful blast, and then "blood started coming out from my head and legs. But I kept running."
Yesterday afternoon, construction workers cleared away the flattened lobby after emergency teams apparently gave up the search for survivors.
One of the Europeans killed in the attack was Sebastiano Conti, a 34-year-old Italian. He was in the last days of a long-planned vacation with his wife, his brother and his brother's girlfriend, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported. The others were injured.
Conti worked at a shopping centre in Riposto; his wife is a cashier there. Corriere della Sera quoted a friend of the Contis as saying that they usually vacationed in Spain, "but this year they chose Egypt because it cost less."
Conti leaves behind two young children, who had remained in Italy with their grandparents.
There have been recent indications of the possibility of pending attacks. In June, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot that his security forces had broken a militant cell that was planning to attack Israeli vacationers in the Sinai.
The resort, a focal point of Egypt's crucial tourist industry, has more than 100 hotels with more than 20,000 rooms — some for backpackers, some for Persian Gulf royalty. Most of the big hotel chains are represented there, including Hyatt, Ritz-Carlton, Hilton and Marriott.
Egypt and Mubarak are despised by Al Qaeda and its adherents for supporting U.S. policy and involvement in the Middle East, as well as for Egypt's peace treaty with Israel. Egypt has also tried to crush Islamic political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood.
A Canadian hotel executive in charge of one of Sharm el-Sheikh's most luxurious hotels told Mitch Potter, the Toronto Star's Middle East correspondent, his guests were holding up with "amazing resilience."
"It seems the human race has proven itself able to endure a great deal in recent years," said Ritz-Carlton Hotel general manager Peter Mainguy, 44, a Montreal native.
"My British guests were especially stoic. One of them said, `What are we supposed to do, go back to London? No place is safe, no place is dangerous. We just have to keep living as we always do.'"
But at the airport, Reena Gurm, one of an estimated 9,000 British tourists in Sharm el-Sheikh, screamed at a tour operator after being told her flight out had been delayed until today.
Offered accommodation at a hotel overnight, she yelled: "What if something happens to us on the way? I want to go home. If it's in Naama Bay, I am not going."
The Toronto Star
The BBC on it
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4709645.stm