At least 83 people were killed and 200 injured when car bombs ripped through shopping and hotel areas in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Saturday in the worst attack in Egypt since 1981.
Shaken European tourists spoke of mass panic and hysteria as people fled the carnage in the early hours, with bodies strewn across the roads, people screaming and sirens wailing.
The regional governor said two car bombs and possibly a suitcase bomb had rocked the resort, popular with divers and European holidaymakers, as well as diplomats who have convened world summits. Egypt has called it "the city of peace."
One blast tore the front off the Ghazala Gardens Hotel in Naama Bay, the site of most of the resort's luxury hotels. People were feared trapped in the rubble of the lobby.
A car broke into the hotel compound and exploded in front of the building, South Sinai Governor Mustafa Afifi said.
"There was a huge ball of smoke that mushroomed up. It was mass hysteria," Charlie Ives, a London policeman on holiday, told BBC World television.
Said Abdel Fattah, the head of the ambulance service in Sharm el-Sheikh, said the emergency services had 62 complete bodies and parts identifiable as coming from 21 others. A senior security source said 23 people were in critical condition from among 35 casualties taken to Cairo for treatment.
Most of the victims were Egyptians but the Tourism Ministry spokeswoman said seven non-Egyptians were dead, including a Czech and an Italian, and 20 were injured.
The injured foreigners were nine Italians, five Saudis, three Britons, a Russian, a Ukrainian and an Israeli Arab, spokeswoman Hala el-Khatib told reporters. But the British Foreign Office in London said eight Britons were injured.
A group claiming links to the al Qaeda organization said it carried out the bombings in retaliation for "crimes committed against Muslims," according to an Internet statement.
The statement, which was not carried on major al Qaeda Web sites, was signed by the Abdullah al-Azzam Brigades of the al Qaeda Organization in the Levant and Egypt. It was not possible to authenticate the claim.
Egyptian Interior Minister Habib el-Adli said it was too early to say whether al Qaeda or other Islamist groups had any connection with the bombings but there was probably a link with attacks further north last October.
In the October bombings, 34 people were killed, most of them at the Taba Hilton on the Israeli border.
Egyptian authorities blamed them on a Palestinian leading an unaffiliated group. Last month Israel stepped up warnings to its own citizens, saying the risk of another such attack had risen.
Security sources said at least one car that blew up on Saturday had special plates indicating it had come over the Israeli border at Taba on the Sinai peninsula.
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