Bomb-laden car hit Hilton lobby

Carpets and insulation hung from the gaping facade of a luxury hotel, where an explosion sheared outer rooms off a 10-storey wing of the hotel, and rescuers dug yesterday for victims buried by the strongest in a series of deadly explosions.

Israeli rescue workers and some Egyptian Red Crescent workers were at the Taba luxury hotel, where at least four people still were believed to be buried.

Gefan Naty, an Israeli military rescuer, said that finding more survivors was unlikely. “I don’t believe anyone is still alive.

We just pulled out one child” who was dead,” Naty said.

The child appeared to be about 10 years old, he said.

The most devastating of the Thursday night strikes were at the Taba Hilton, where a car laden with explosives crashed into the lobby of the hotel and detonated, an Israeli official said on condition of anonymity.

There were reports of a second or third explosion within the hotel compound, one of which may have been caused by a suicide bomber.

The gutted, burned out shell of a vehicle rested inside a hotel meeting room, drawing considerable interest from officials on the scene.

Citing ongoing investigation, they would not say if it was the vehicle suspected of having carried the explosives.

Sheets and blankets tied to balconies on intact rooms of the hotel showed the frantic efforts by guests to flee.

Stairs of a fire-escape were twisted perpendicular to the building and the entrance gate was blown away.

Business cards, CDs, Pepsi bottles and cans and personal items were scattered around.

Naty said a mother and daughter fell from the seventh floor to the first; the mother died of her injuries, but the daughter survived.

Naty said he believed rescue workers could have saved the mother if they been allowed to get to the scene earlier.

Egyptian authorities, he said, delayed their arrival: “I don’t know why.” Egyptian government spokesman Magdy Rady denied any delays in allowing the Israelis in. “There was no such a thing – no delay at all.

Don’t believe the Israelis,” Rady said. Meir Frajun said his three children were playing one floor below the lobby when the blast tore through the building.

He went down but found only two of them. “Everything was filled with smoke,” Frajun said after crossing into the nearby Israeli resort of Eilat.

Initial friction “We were hysterically looking for the child. In the end we found him sitting outside with an Arab guest of the hotel.”

Earlier, Israeli and Egyptian rescue officials agreed after initial friction to cooperate in a search for people buried under the rubble.

“The Egyptians have brought their own rescue team, which will work inside...and we are working outside,” Shahar Zeid, fire chief of the Israeli resort of Eilat, just across the border, said at the wrecked Hilton Taba hotel.

“The (Israeli) fire brig-ade along with other services have begun to move the big pieces of rubble outside the building, using cranes,” Zeid said.

The division of labour was agreed after Israeli national fire chief Shimon Romach complained that Israeli emergency crews had been moved aside by the Egyptians and were awaiting permission to use heavy equipment.

Romach complained that Egyptian authorities had delayed for hours approval of an Israeli request to move heavy equipment across the border to help remove rubble at the hotel.

But Israel seemed anxious to avoid straining relations with Egypt, which in 1979 became the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state and is currently trying to help smooth a planned Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip.

In a statement, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmad Abdul Geit had phoned his Israeli counterpart, Silvan Shalom, and voiced regret over any delays.

Tourist exodus Meanwhile, in Eilat, thousands of panicked Israelis fled yesterday back into Israel from across the border in Egypt after bomb blasts in the Sinai Peninsula on Thursday. “We’re scared. We no longer need to stay here,” said one Israeli woman who had hired a taxi to get her back “to Israel as fast as possible”.

A 30-year-old Israeli woman Ronit said she had seen “a huge ball of fire shooting into the air,” coming from the Hilton hotel.

She and her friends decided to leave at once but took two hours to cross the border, instead of the usual 30 minutes.

Israeli-registered cars, some with windscreens shattered, and packed with holiday-makers queued at the Taba border point.

Dozens of exhausted Israeli tourists, many in beachgear and wearing medical blankets, could been seen trudging along the road to Eilat.