EGYPT: Jittery foreign tourists scrambled to quit the bomb-stricken resort of Sharm el-Sheikh yesterday following Egypt's worst terrorist attack which struck at the heart of the country's vital tourist industry.
Egyptian authorities last night gave the confirmed death toll as 64, down from earlier estimates in the high 80s. Police detained more than 70 people in Sharm el-Sheikh and elsewhere on the Sinai Peninsula for questioning amid competing claims of responsibility by two Islamic groups, one with professed links to al-Qaeda.
With bodies still being identified yesterday, hospital officials believed that all but seven of the dead and almost all of the 200 injured in the triple bombing were Egyptians.
The foreign dead are reported to include two Britons, two Germans and an Italian, with no reports of Irish dead or injured.
The three co-ordinated blasts gutted a hotel as well as a marketplace and a taxi stand in the busy resort, exploding minutes apart shortly after 1.15am local time on Saturday.
As Egyptian investigators continued to search the wreckage yesterday, anxious tourists added some gruesome photographs of the bomb scenes to their holiday snaps.
Egyptian police allowed civilians to wander freely amid the shattered glass and clue-riddled detritus and to peer into the three-metre wide crater caused by one of the blasts, a truck bomb that struck at the heart of the Old Market in Sharm al-Maya bay.
Keith Sladen (51) and Sandra Wills (50) from Rochdale, Manchester, were yesterday spending the last day of their fortnight-long visit in an uneasy mood.
"It's just killed the holiday for us," said Keith, who brought Sandra on holiday for her 50th birthday.
"We would have left yesterday but we couldn't get away. I just can't get my head around it. What makes it worse is that one of our hotel staff is still missing. He was one of the waiters, a really nice chap."
Sharm el-Sheikh hosts some two million tourists annually in the 185 hotels that line the resort's palm-fringed highway, a tacky Las Vegas-style strip in the midst of the barren desert of the southern Sinai Peninsula.
Tourism is worth about €5 billion annually to the Egyptian economy, and Sharm el-Sheikh, which was widely seen as a safe resort, is the jewel in the industry's crown. Arab and European visitors come to scuba dive and snorkel in the clear waters which are teeming with exotic fish and exquisite coral reefs. The local staff are attentive and the prices competitive.
Hundreds of foreign tourists packed their bags and flew back to European capitals yesterday, with most leaving on regularly scheduled flights, although some were also leaving early.
At Sharm el-Sheikh airport, an agent for the Italian tour operator, In Viaggi, said about 50 per cent of his customers were leaving early and the company was offering alternative deals to those who had cancelled holiday plans.
"It's an economic disaster, especially for the people living here," said tour leader Marco Vendramin.
"For Italians, people are afraid, but I think English people or Russians they will keep coming. There is no . . . place that is safe."
A honeymoon couple from Moira in Northern Ireland who came for a fortnight-long holiday checked out of Sharm's Marriot Hotel a week early yesterday, driving two hours north to catch a flight home.
Chris Sinclair (30) and his new wife Danny (28) were asleep when a suicide bomber barrelled his car packed with 660 pounds of explosives into the driveway of the nearby Ghazala Gardens Hotel, one of the few on the strip whose reception area is easily accessible from the main road. The heavy curtains in their room protected them from flying glass when their windows shattered by the blast.
"I don't feel it's appropriate staying here," said Danny. "There are staff here who know people who died and I don't think you can really justify it."
Danny, who was at school when the IRA bombed the Thiepval British army barracks in Lisburn in 1996, said her holiday reading had been a book about IRA terrorism, and the attacks had made her feel deeply paranoid.
Egypt's interior minister, Habib el-Adli, said yesterday there could be a link between the weekend's attacks and bombs in the Sinai resorts of Taba and Ras Shitan last October in which 34 people, mostly Israelis, were killed. Egyptian authorities have dismissed those attacks as the work of Palestinian individuals targeting Israeli vacationers, not Egypt.
However, the Sharm el-Sheikh blasts were claimed on an Islamic website by the Abdullah Azzam Brigades of al-Qaeda in Syria and Egypt which also claimed last October's attacks as well as two minor attacks on tourist sites this spring. Later, a previously unknown grouping, the Holy Warriors of Egypt, claimed its members were behind the attacks. Neither claim could be verified.