Second Time Is A Charm For The Animals
In Egypt, at the Sharm el-Sheik resort, three powerful car blasts went off, demolishing the hotels, and adjacent buildings, and killing almost sixty people. Almost one hundred forty people are injured in a blast which was heard up to a kilometer away.
Three car bombs exploded in quick succession in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik, ripping through a hotel and a coffee shop packed with European and Egyptian tourists. The government said at least 59 people died in the deadliest attack in Egypt in nearly a decade.
The reception hall of the luxury Ghazala Gardens hotel collapsed into a pancaked pile of concrete, sending terrified guests fleeing for safety, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene. Rescue workers hours later said they feared more victims may be buried in the rubble.
The string of powerful blasts, beginning at 1:15 a.m., rattled windows miles away and raised flames and palls of smoke over Naama Bay, a main strip of beach hotels in the desert city at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, also popular with Israeli tourists, witnesses said.
Through the night, dazed tourists milled about the streets as Egyptian rescuers searched for dead and injured. Bodies of the dead lay under white bed sheets or were loaded in plastic bags into ambulances, while other emergency vehicles sped away with the wounded.
"There seemed to be a lot of bodies strewn across the road" near one cafe, British policeman Chris Reynolds, visiting from Birmingham, England, told the BBC by telephone. "It was horrendous."
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which came nine months after simultaneous bombings hit two resorts further north in Sinai, killing 34 people. The new bombings appeared well coordinated, happening within minutes of each in locations as far as 4km apart.
Interior Minister Habib al-Adli said at least 59 people had been killed, all but eight of them Egyptians, and 119 wounded - and he pinned the attack on Islamic militants. "This is an ugly act of terrorism," al-Adli said in a statement carried on the government news agency. "It has nothing to do with Islam, they are only acting under the slogan of Islam."
The dead included British, Russian, Dutch, Kuwaitis, Saudis and Qataris, a security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was giving information not yet included in the official statement.
One of the explosives-laden cars smashed through security into the front driveway of the Ghazala Gardens and detonated, said South Sinai province's governor, Mustafa Afifi - suggesting it was a suicide bomber, though he did not specify that.
The blast tore down the reception hall and shattered windows deep into the sprawling, 176-room resort complex. Inside the hotel, bloodstains dotted the floors and tree branches and twisted metal lay flung around the grounds. As daylight came, workers were clearing debris as investigators picked through rubble.
After the explosion, guests fled to a grassy area behind the hotel pool, spending the night lying on pool mattresses or the ground. "The windows came blasting in," said David Stewart, a tourist from Liverpool, England, who was huddling on the back lawn with his wife and two teen-aged daughters. "Somebody shouted, 'Keep moving.' The lights were out. I couldn't tell what was happening."
A second car bomb exploded in a parking area near the Movenpick Hotel, also in Naama Bay, said a receptionist there who declined to identify himself.
The third detonated at a minibus parking lot in the Old Market, an area about 4km) away where many Egyptians and others who work in the resorts live. The blast ripped through a nearby outdoor coffee shop, killing 17 people, believed to be Egyptians, said a security official in the operations control room in Cairo monitoring the crisis.
More than eight hours later, an overturned shell of a minibus was still smoldering in the lot, not far from a large crater. Pools of blood and overturned chairs littered the coffee shop, and the facade of a nearby mall was smashed into a windowless shell. Shards of another vehicle, apparently the one that carried the explosives, were strewn across the wide lot.
Saturday's bombings were the deadliest since 1997, when Islamic militants killed 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians at the Pharaonic Temple of Hatshepsut outside Luxor in southern Egypt.
That was the last major terror attack in Egypt for years, until last October's bombings at hotels in the Sinai resorts of Taba and Ras Shitan, about 100 miles northwest of Sharm on the Israel border. Egyptian authorities said that attack was linked to Israeli-Palestinian violence, and they launched a wave of arrests in Sinai.
President Hosni Mubarak has a residence in Sharm el-Sheik, at a resort several kilometres (miles) outside Naama Bay and often spends weeks there at a time in the winter. But during the summer, he stays at a residence in the northern city of Alexandria.
A British tourist, Fabio Basone, was in Naama Bay's Hard Rock Cafe when he heard a small explosion, then a larger one that sparked "mass panic with people running and screaming in all directions."
"We went outside on to the street where we were met with hundreds of people running and screaming in all directions," he told BBC Television. "I saw the front of a hotel had been blown away ... There were two bodies on the floor but I don't know if they were dead."
Scores of ambulances from cities in the northern Sinai and the Suez Canal cities of Suez and Ismailiya were headed to Sharm to help with casualties. Doctors from the Health Ministry were boarding planes for Sharm from Cairo, where security forces were more visible in the streets.
I can only speculate that the animals responsible for this attack wanted to remind a few nations that they are still around. The news reports stated earlier the majority of the dead are Brits. So what was this exactly? Was this a game of one-upmanship by one cell over the failed bombings in London earlier this week? Or were they simply attempting to resend the same message.
What is that message? We hate you? Thanks for the memo, but I think the world had that figured out a long time ago. We got the message in 1979 when our embassy was occupied for 444 days. We got the message in the mid-eighties when over 240 Marines were killed in Lebanon. We got the message in the nineties with the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. We were hit in the face on 9/11. Spain was hit on 3/11. London was hit on 7/7. Yes, the world has received your message: You do not like the West, or anything it stands for.
Now, here is a return memo to you animals: The more innocents you bomb the more this world will turn against you. Britain is not going to wilt under your attacks. Nor will the US. You are losing the war in Iraq, and you continuously show your desperation when you attack civilians. You cannot win this war by taking such actions. It will only reinforce the resolve of nations that stand for freedom, or those that are embracing freedom. Former Soviet-bloc nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia are supporting us in this war because of the oppression they endured under its communist master.
The same is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those nations—newly freed—have a duly elected government that supports or efforts to finish rooting the animals out of their nations. The US and her allies are going to finish the job that we joined on 9/12. We will not waver from our job, which is to put an end to this menace now before it becomes a larger plague for future generations. But until that day comes, we will have to endure the cowardly, barbaric acts perpetrated by a group of people that have refused to evolve past the Seventh Century.
The Bunny ;)
In Egypt, at the Sharm el-Sheik resort, three powerful car blasts went off, demolishing the hotels, and adjacent buildings, and killing almost sixty people. Almost one hundred forty people are injured in a blast which was heard up to a kilometer away.
Three car bombs exploded in quick succession in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik, ripping through a hotel and a coffee shop packed with European and Egyptian tourists. The government said at least 59 people died in the deadliest attack in Egypt in nearly a decade.
The reception hall of the luxury Ghazala Gardens hotel collapsed into a pancaked pile of concrete, sending terrified guests fleeing for safety, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene. Rescue workers hours later said they feared more victims may be buried in the rubble.
The string of powerful blasts, beginning at 1:15 a.m., rattled windows miles away and raised flames and palls of smoke over Naama Bay, a main strip of beach hotels in the desert city at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, also popular with Israeli tourists, witnesses said.
Through the night, dazed tourists milled about the streets as Egyptian rescuers searched for dead and injured. Bodies of the dead lay under white bed sheets or were loaded in plastic bags into ambulances, while other emergency vehicles sped away with the wounded.
"There seemed to be a lot of bodies strewn across the road" near one cafe, British policeman Chris Reynolds, visiting from Birmingham, England, told the BBC by telephone. "It was horrendous."
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which came nine months after simultaneous bombings hit two resorts further north in Sinai, killing 34 people. The new bombings appeared well coordinated, happening within minutes of each in locations as far as 4km apart.
Interior Minister Habib al-Adli said at least 59 people had been killed, all but eight of them Egyptians, and 119 wounded - and he pinned the attack on Islamic militants. "This is an ugly act of terrorism," al-Adli said in a statement carried on the government news agency. "It has nothing to do with Islam, they are only acting under the slogan of Islam."
The dead included British, Russian, Dutch, Kuwaitis, Saudis and Qataris, a security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was giving information not yet included in the official statement.
One of the explosives-laden cars smashed through security into the front driveway of the Ghazala Gardens and detonated, said South Sinai province's governor, Mustafa Afifi - suggesting it was a suicide bomber, though he did not specify that.
The blast tore down the reception hall and shattered windows deep into the sprawling, 176-room resort complex. Inside the hotel, bloodstains dotted the floors and tree branches and twisted metal lay flung around the grounds. As daylight came, workers were clearing debris as investigators picked through rubble.
After the explosion, guests fled to a grassy area behind the hotel pool, spending the night lying on pool mattresses or the ground. "The windows came blasting in," said David Stewart, a tourist from Liverpool, England, who was huddling on the back lawn with his wife and two teen-aged daughters. "Somebody shouted, 'Keep moving.' The lights were out. I couldn't tell what was happening."
A second car bomb exploded in a parking area near the Movenpick Hotel, also in Naama Bay, said a receptionist there who declined to identify himself.
The third detonated at a minibus parking lot in the Old Market, an area about 4km) away where many Egyptians and others who work in the resorts live. The blast ripped through a nearby outdoor coffee shop, killing 17 people, believed to be Egyptians, said a security official in the operations control room in Cairo monitoring the crisis.
More than eight hours later, an overturned shell of a minibus was still smoldering in the lot, not far from a large crater. Pools of blood and overturned chairs littered the coffee shop, and the facade of a nearby mall was smashed into a windowless shell. Shards of another vehicle, apparently the one that carried the explosives, were strewn across the wide lot.
Saturday's bombings were the deadliest since 1997, when Islamic militants killed 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians at the Pharaonic Temple of Hatshepsut outside Luxor in southern Egypt.
That was the last major terror attack in Egypt for years, until last October's bombings at hotels in the Sinai resorts of Taba and Ras Shitan, about 100 miles northwest of Sharm on the Israel border. Egyptian authorities said that attack was linked to Israeli-Palestinian violence, and they launched a wave of arrests in Sinai.
President Hosni Mubarak has a residence in Sharm el-Sheik, at a resort several kilometres (miles) outside Naama Bay and often spends weeks there at a time in the winter. But during the summer, he stays at a residence in the northern city of Alexandria.
A British tourist, Fabio Basone, was in Naama Bay's Hard Rock Cafe when he heard a small explosion, then a larger one that sparked "mass panic with people running and screaming in all directions."
"We went outside on to the street where we were met with hundreds of people running and screaming in all directions," he told BBC Television. "I saw the front of a hotel had been blown away ... There were two bodies on the floor but I don't know if they were dead."
Scores of ambulances from cities in the northern Sinai and the Suez Canal cities of Suez and Ismailiya were headed to Sharm to help with casualties. Doctors from the Health Ministry were boarding planes for Sharm from Cairo, where security forces were more visible in the streets.
I can only speculate that the animals responsible for this attack wanted to remind a few nations that they are still around. The news reports stated earlier the majority of the dead are Brits. So what was this exactly? Was this a game of one-upmanship by one cell over the failed bombings in London earlier this week? Or were they simply attempting to resend the same message.
What is that message? We hate you? Thanks for the memo, but I think the world had that figured out a long time ago. We got the message in 1979 when our embassy was occupied for 444 days. We got the message in the mid-eighties when over 240 Marines were killed in Lebanon. We got the message in the nineties with the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. We were hit in the face on 9/11. Spain was hit on 3/11. London was hit on 7/7. Yes, the world has received your message: You do not like the West, or anything it stands for.
Now, here is a return memo to you animals: The more innocents you bomb the more this world will turn against you. Britain is not going to wilt under your attacks. Nor will the US. You are losing the war in Iraq, and you continuously show your desperation when you attack civilians. You cannot win this war by taking such actions. It will only reinforce the resolve of nations that stand for freedom, or those that are embracing freedom. Former Soviet-bloc nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia are supporting us in this war because of the oppression they endured under its communist master.
The same is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those nations—newly freed—have a duly elected government that supports or efforts to finish rooting the animals out of their nations. The US and her allies are going to finish the job that we joined on 9/12. We will not waver from our job, which is to put an end to this menace now before it becomes a larger plague for future generations. But until that day comes, we will have to endure the cowardly, barbaric acts perpetrated by a group of people that have refused to evolve past the Seventh Century.
The Bunny ;)
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 12:26 AM
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