Pools of dried blood, shredded bathing suits, charred cars and rubble were left behind on Friday after a car bomb rocked Egypt’s Taba Hilton hotel, killing a still-undetermined number of people.
The attacks there late on Thursday night and at a backpacker’s resort further down the Red Sea coast on the Sinai peninsula left at least 30 people dead and more than 100 wounded, according to Israeli figures.
Half of the 13-storey-high building front had slid sideways, with air-conditioners, mattresses and blinds dangling. The force of the blast had blown out every window. Most of cars parked up front were gutted and blackened.
A gold-painted statue of ancient Egypt’s pharaoh Tutankhamen stood awkwardly tall and regal but for its nose, which had been blown off.
Inside the hotel, which hosted failed peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians in 2001, laid the twisted remains of the van that, laden with dozens of kilograms of explosive, had rammed into the lobby late on Thursday night.
Staircases and ceilings had collapsed and huge chunks of tangled metal and concrete could be seen.
Scattered trays, food and melted ice cream, mixed with shards of glass, littered the floor of a restaurant on the hotel’s ground floor, where some of the victims ate their last meal.
Sun beds covered in bloodstains lined up by the outdoor pool, which was completely drained of water.
An adjacent kids’ club had been almost entirely destroyed in the explosion and small plastic chairs were scattered around the floor. A child’s drawing that miraculously survived the havoc read in Hebrew: ”I had a good time here.”
Witnesses said earlier on Friday how they had joined rescuers to help pick up bodies left in tatters or free them from slabs of concrete and metal rods.
Still shaken from the blast that almost threw him from his bed, Hassan Yussef Shihab said he saw two bodies — apparently Egyptians — pinned by the rods as he took his wife, child and mother-in-law to safety.
Shihab (39) went back into the building: ”Seeing 10 bodies blocking the staircase, I decided to try to get them out to the hotel entrance. They were shredded, blackened, burnt, in a terrible state.
”I took one on my shoulder. Its arm fell off,” he said, adding that on his way out, between the stairway and the hotel entrance ”I saw parts of bodies, some fingers, and a head without a body, pieces of flesh. It was horrible.”
He said the explosion occurred as many people were still eating in the restaurants, which was why there were many people on the ground floor.
On Friday morning, uniformed Israelis were searching the debris looking for clues, according to another witness.
The hotel lies between the shores of the Red Sea and the mountains of Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, and is within easy walking distance of Israel, across the frontier.
”I saw bodies thrown into the sea,” one firefighter told journalists early on Friday after helping put out the fire at the hotel, which was built by the Israelis in 1982 before Taba was handed back to Egypt. ”There was blood everywhere.”
After the explosion hit, hundreds of Israelis streamed towards the Taba border crossing just a few hundred metres from the hotel, while ambulances ferried the wounded to hospitals in the Israeli resort of Eilat.
”We felt the explosion behind us. It was as if the world had exploded. The smoke was incredibly thick,” said Mili Ayari (28) from Tel Aviv, as she lay on a stretcher at Eilat’s Yosseftal hospital.
Aya Reich (28) was slightly wounded in the leg in the blast.
”I will never go back to Egypt,” she said, although she added that she has ”nothing against the Egyptians”. — Sapa-AFP