After hours of clearing through rubble and metal, emergency workers called off rescue efforts, at least temporarily, around midday.On the other side of Sharm, in the Old Market, a second car bomb sent a ball of flaming wreckage shooting over a nearby beach and into the sea, littering the sand with body parts. The lobby of the 176-room Ghazala Gardens hotel collapsed into a pile of concrete. The injured foreigners included nine Italians, five Saudis, three Britons, a Russian, a Ukrainian and an Israeli Arab The death toll could rise, rescue workers said. The man had been on holiday with his girlfriend.Most of the victims were Egyptians but seven non-Egyptians died, including a Czech and an Italian. The girl’s 20-year-old sister was among three people being treated in Sharm el Sheikh hospital for cuts and bruises.

It was mass hysteria,” Charlie Ives, a London policeman on holiday, told BBC World television.Among the 23 people critically injured were two British tourists, a 14-year-old girl and a 30-year-old man. They were taken by helicopter to the Maadi military hospital in Cairo. Witnesses said a car broke into the hotel compound and exploded in front of the building “There was a huge ball of smoke that mushroomed up. A third bomb detonated around the same time near a beachside walkway where tourists often stroll at night.One blast tore the front off the Ghazala Gardens hotel in Na’ama Bay, the site of most of the resort’s luxury hotels People were feared trapped in the rubble of the lobby. Shaken European tourists spoke of mass panic and hysteria as three blasts went off in different parts of the resort, causing carnage in the immediate vicinity and frightened confusion elsewhere.

The attack, Egypt’s deadliest terror hit, appeared well co-ordinated.

Two car bombs, possibly by suicide attackers, went off simultaneously at 1:15am about two miles apart. Eighty-eight people, including two Britons, were killed and 200 injured when car bombs ripped through shopping and hotel areas in Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheikh yesterday. At least 13 charred and wrecked cars, one of them mangled beyond recognition, were scattered around the plaza. Surgical gloves discarded by the rescue services littered the scorched tarmac and caked blood stains were still clearly visible on the pavement outside the mall. And, above the scene in what, the night before, had been holiday town, the square’s clock was stopped at the very second the explosion happened Additional reporting by Will Davison and Aline Nassif. “There were body parts all over the steps down to the beach.” As night fell there, a cordoned crater four feet deep and some 12 feet wide showed where the blast occurred.