Hotel worker tells of 10 second escape from blast

The pickup truck sped down the driveway of the Ghazala Gardens hotel, smashed through the glass facade into the lobby and screeched to a halt two metres away from a dumbstruck hotel employee.

About 10 seconds later, it unleashed a devastating blast. Those 10 seconds gave the employee, Mohammad Mansour, time to reach cover, making him one of the few survivors of anyone in the hotel lobby.

The terror spree in Sharm Al Shaikh started early on Saturday morning when the first truck exploded at the Old Market, a traditional Arab shopping district frequented by tourists by day but Egyptian workers late at night.

The force of the blast caused the clock in a nearby square to stop at 1.15am.

Ten minutes later, at 1.25am, the second pickup rammed into the lobby of the Ghazala Gardens, eight km from the market on Peace Road, a stretch of luxury hotels and casinos.

Four minutes after that, a suitcase bomb exploded in a parking lot at the end of a beach promenade about 150 metres from the Ghazala detonating just as a crowd of people was running toward the hotel. Police have speculated that the Ghazala truck bomber dropped off a fellow militant to plant the suitcase and then drove on to the hotel, but some investigators believe the suitcase bomber came separately and may have died in the blast.

Mansour, a 28-year-old receptionist at another Ghazala branch across the street, described how he was over at the Ghazala Gardens when he heard sirens from the first attack. Oblivious, he continued chatting with an employee at the front desk.

Then, a frantic tourist ran into the reception area and jumped over the counter. Right behind him, the speeding pickup truck smashed into the lobby. It came to a stop near Mansour.

"My friends started running upstairs. I was fixated. I looked behind and there it was at my back, only yards away," Mansour recalled from his hospital bed, white bandages on his legs, hands and arms and stitches in his head.

He was about to follow the people running deeper inside the hotel when he heard another friend, a security guard, shout, "Report a terrorist!" At last Mansour realised what was going on. He put his hands on his head and sprinted outside to the parking lot.

"This all took seconds. Ten seconds, and I look behind me, it went off. It was like a sun at midday. [The smoke] was like a cloud I was running through," he said, his eyes red and tearful.

Hotel officials say 14 of Mansour's colleagues died in the explosion, which flattened the lobby like a pancake. In those brief moments, Mansour could see the truck bed was loaded with boxes or flat objects. But he saw no one step out of the pickup, and with the speed of the vehicle and his own confusion, he failed to notice how many passengers there were.