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Car bomb explodes in sharm el sheikh { July 23 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/eff5c026-fb16-11d9-a0f6-00000e2511c8.htmlhttp://news.ft.com/cms/s/eff5c026-fb16-11d9-a0f6-00000e2511c8.html
Bombs in Egyptian resort kill at least 36
By Roula Khalaf
Published: July 23 2005 03:00 | Last updated: July 23 2005 03:00
At least 36 people were reported killed and 100 more injured in a series of bomb explosions in the popular Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh last night, according to local police.
Details of the explosions were sketchy but witnesses quoted by news agencies reported that four cars had exploded, some of them in the parking lot of a four-star hotel. The blasts were the second assault on resorts in the Red Sea over the past year. Last October, an attack on a hotel popular with Israeli tourists left 24 people dead.
Egypt suffered a campaign of violence by two radical Islamist groups in the 1990s but security forces won the upper hand after the 1997 massacre of tourists at Luxor. The two active organisations, the Gama'a Islamiya and Islamic Jihad, have since declared a truce and their members remain under close watch by the authorities or in jail.
Last October's attack was blamed on a small cell of local residents in the Sinai and the government insisted that they had no connection to the larger organisations. Israel, however, blamed the al-Qaeda network for the violence.
Concern over Egyptian radicals, however, emerged after the London bombings of July 7. Egyptian authorities arrested a chemistry student who had studied in Leeds, West Yorkshire, fearing he might have been connected to the four bombers who had attacked London's transport system. Egyptian officials this week, however, insisted that Magdy al-Nashar had no involvement in the London blasts.
The resort of Sharm el-Sheikh is a popular destination with European and Russian tourists and hotels and sites have been on high alert since the October attacks. President Hosni Mubarak has a holiday villa in one of the luxury resorts and he has tended to hold most high-profile summits there. Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, spent part of the Christmas holidays in the area.
Egyptian officials were relieved that the October attack on Israeli tourists had failed to provoke a sharp drop in tourism revenues. But while that violence was perceived as part of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, a larger assault in Sharm el-Sheikh raises concerns over the possible emergence of new al-Qaeda-related cells in Egypt and could have more lasting impact on the economy.
The bombings come at a delicate political time in Cairo. Under pressure from an increasingly active political opposition and from the US, Mr Mubarak has announced that Egypt will hold multi-candidate presidential elections for the first time this September.
* A bomb exploded on a narrow Beirut street crowded with bars and restaurants, wounding 12 people, just hours after Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, visited the area yesterday, Lebanese officials said.
The bomb was placed near a car parked in front of a restaurant.
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