Terrorists have attacked Egypt again killing 62 in incidents that involved suicide bombers…and a group tied to Al Qaeda later claimed credit for the operation. This was not the first time Egypt faced an Al Qaeda-related threat.
The scene this time: the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik. The setting: a hotel and coffee shop. The event: Saturday morning normality shattered when a bomb ripped through the hotel, murdering 62 people. The AP reports:
The reception hall of the luxury Ghazala Gardens hotel collapsed into a pancaked pile of concrete, sending terrified guests fleeing for safety, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene. Rescue workers hours later said they feared more victims may be buried in the rubble.
The explosions, beginning at 1:15 a.m., rattled windows miles away and raised flames and palls of smoke over 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.
Dazed beachgoers milled about the darkened streets as Egyptian rescuers searched for dead and injured. Bodies 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.”
The BBC notes that the incident, which came at the height of Egypt’s crucial tourism season — Egypt’s tourism industry seems to have become a prime target of terrorists — involved a suicide bomber:
The blasts came within minutes of each other, shortly after 0100 local time (2200 GMT), when the bars and markets were busy with tourists.
In the most devastating attack, a bomber rammed his car into Ghazala Gardens Hotel, according to an eyewitness.
“A suicide car bomber forced the barrier at the entrance of the hotel. A member of the security staff tried to stop him but he sped towards the reception and there was a huge explosion,” an unnamed hotel employee told AFP news agency.
Officials believe the mastermind behind these attacks could be linked to the attacks in October on resorts in the Sinai Peninsula resorts. The deadly tally in those attacks that entailed three explosions that destroyed hotels in Taba and two other Sinai resorts: 34 people, most of them Israelis.
In this attack, it’s clear many Muslims perished. Glenn Reynolds predicts:
I predict that this will only encourage the loss of patience with Islamist radicalism that is already sweeping the world. That’s the problem for terrorists: If they try to terrorize, they make people mad. If they don’t, then, well, they’re not really terrorists.
Meanwhile, a group that says it has ties to Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility on a website. Several things about that: (a)until it’s confirmed it’s just that – a statement on a website (b)Egypt DOES have a long history of being a target of Al Qaeda:
The group, which calls itself the Abdullah Azzam Brigades (search) in Syria and Egypt, posted a statement to an Islamic Web site saying its “holy warriors targeted the Ghazala Gardens hotel and the Old Market in Sharm el-Sheikh (search).”
The weblog Secular Blasphemy notes:
It has been a major objective of the terrorists to hit at Egypt’s important tourist industry for more than a decade. The most deadly attack still in Egypt (and that record may hold even today’s atrocity) was a massacre by gunmen of more than 60 people, most of them tourists, in Luxor in 1997. It is well known that much of what later became al-Qaeda grew out of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (which has later moderated its aims and methods). The assumed number two in al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is an Egyptian physician who merged his Egyptian Islamic Jihad with Bin Laden’s group. Obviously, they still have a dangerous presence in Egypt.
Indeed, just look at some of these news and web stories on Egypt and Al Qaeda:
–Osama bin Laden’s rocky history with Egypt Also: read this.
—Kidnapped Egytian diplomat murdered by Al Qaeda group
—Links between Egyptian terrorist groups and Al Qaeda
—October blasts and Al Qaeda
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.