Londoner relives bomb horror on Egypt holiday
Manilla Times ^ / Jul 24, 2005 / Lamia Radi
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt: Joanna had hoped her holiday in an Egyptian seaside resort would help her overcome the trauma of witnessing the deadly London bombings two weeks ago.
But the horror was replayed for the 25-year-old Londoner when a car bomb smashed into her hotel in Sharm el-Sheikh in the early hours of Saturday.
“I would never have believed that I would witness the same nightmare and terror twice in such a short time,” said Joanna, who managed to escape unscathed from the attacks.
At least 83 people, including a number of foreign tourists, were killed and more than 110 injured in the quick succession of bombings that rocked hotels and a market in Sharm el-Sheikh, a favored holiday destination for British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Joanna, who declined to give her full name, was near the site of one of the four deadly bomb blasts in London.
“I was counting on this holiday to forget the nightmare in London,” she told AFP.
“I was in the Ghazala Hotel when the explosion went off. My room was just behind the reception. I was in bed and the bed rocked,” she said, as security forces escorted her and her husband onto a bus leaving the town.
The deadliest of the attacks that left a trail of carnage and destruction in Egypt’s most popular holiday resort at the height of the tourist season almost caused the Ghazala Garden Hotel to collapse and killed at least 30 people, mostly Egyptians.
According to police and several witnesses, a suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden vehicle into the luxury seafront hotel, smashing the security barrier before blowing up inside the reception.
The Foreign Office in London said several Britons were among the victims.
Jimmy and Ann Hayes, a Scottish couple on their second summer holiday in Sharm el-Sheikh, were staying at the Movenpick Hotel, which is near the Ghazala Garden.
“We heard a God Almighty blast. The lock popped out of the door, the window frame banged and the glass shattered,” Jimmy Hayes told AFP, as security cleared the debris, the blast sent flying within a radius of several hundred yards. We went out of the hotel like everybody else and I heard another blast, and another and another,” he recounted. “I thought people were shelling us . . . I thought our end had come.”
“We were here last year. It’s so nice here and the people are very friendly. Now the feeling has completely changed. We will be scared to come here again, after such a chilling experience,” he added.
Saturday’s attacks were the deadliest ever in Egypt, although more tourists were killed in October bombings on the nearby Red Sea resort of Taba and in the 1997 attack in the southern town of Luxor that left 58 foreigners dead.
A Briton was killed by an Islamist group in southern Egypt in October 1992 and two British tourists were among 15 wounded in a bomb attack near the Pyramids in June 1993.
One Briton was also killed and three others wounded in two attacks in southern Egypt in October 1994.
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