Egyptian police made a series of arrests on Sunday as they stepped up the hunt for the network behind three deadly bombings, but officials admitted they had no clear leads over who was behind the country’s worst terrorist attack, and many of the suspects were later released.
President Hosni Mubarak broke off his summer holiday to take charge of the crisis and visit some of the injured in hospital, while investigators studied claims of responsibility from two groups.
Officials who spoke to The Guardian on Sunday lowered the confirmed death toll from 88 to 64, but admitted that casualties among foreigners could have been much worse.
General Mustafa Afifi, the governor of South Sinai, said that a car which exploded near the Old Market area opposite a coffee shop where minibus drivers and other Egyptians were drinking was intended for a tourist hotel.
”There was a police road-block. The driver tried to avoid it, but the timer went off at the wrong moment because of the delay,” he said.
The result was that most victims in that explosion were Egyptian. A second bomb, placed by a man near a minibus park in Naama Bay, also mainly killed Egyptians.
The third attack was from a suicide bomber who drove into the parking area at the front of the Ghazala Gardens hotel and ploughed into the reception area.
Officials said the Sharm bombing gang appeared to have entered the town in pick-up trucks loaded with explosives hidden under vegetables.
As one headed for the Ghazala, where it was detonated by a suicide bomber, another was making its way to a second luxury beachside hotel.
Afifi said the initial death toll given out in the news media of 88 was too high. The figure was 64 dead, of whom 25 had been positively identified as Egyptian and eight as foreigners, he said. Another 31 bodies were awaiting identification.
Two separate groups have claimed responsibility for the bombings. A website statement by the Abdullah Azzam brigades, al-Qaeda in Syria and Egypt, said: ”Your brothers succeeded in launching a crushing blow on the Crusaders, Zionists, and the infidel Egyptian regime in Sharm el-Sheikh.” Later, the previously unknown ”Holy Warriors of Egypt” said its supporters had been responsible and named five people it claimed were the bombers.
Afifi admitted the attacks had caught the authorities unawares. Security at hotel entrances was supposed to have been stepped up after an attack in the Red Sea resorts of Taba and Ras Shitan last October.
He blamed the guard at the Ghazala hotel for leaving the gate to the parking area open. ”We had everything under control but I don’t know what happened. The reason may be the lateness of the hour or because it was not yet high season. He tried to stop the car but it ran over him.”
Sinai is under specially tight security conditions because of its proximity to Israel and the Gaza Strip and the high number of Israeli visitors to its resorts. Although foreigners escaped the brunt of the explosions, the three attacks are a blow to Egypt’s tourist industry. The high season officially began on Sunday, when hotels raise prices and expect a surge in foreign visitors. But shopkeepers were laying off staff and some were planning to close for several weeks to see if business picks up again later.
In Cairo on Sunday there was another security alert over a potential suicide bomb after an explosion several kilometres from a tourist bazaar next to the pyramids of Giza.
Investigators were trying to determine whether the man carrying the explosive, who was severely injured in the blast, was taking the bomb to the nearby tourist area of Kerdassa, a bazaar of souvenir shops near the pyramids, a security official told the Associated Press.
The device apparently went off accidentally in the neighbourhood of Kufr Tuhurmus, several kilometres from Kerdassa, said the official.
The alleged bomber, an employee at a hospital, was too badly injured to be interrogated, the official said. – Guardian Unlimited Â