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2005 Sharm el-Sheikh attacks
Location	Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt
Target(s)	A market in downtown Sharm and the Ghazala Gardens hotel
Date	July 23, 2005 01:15 am – 01:20 am (UTC+3)
Attack type	Suicide bombings
Deaths	88
Injured	~ 150
Perpetrator(s)	Abdullah Azzam Brigades. For more information, see below.

The 2005 Sharm el-Sheikh attacks were a series of terror attacks on July 23, 2005, perpetrated by a Wahabi organization, targeting the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, located on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. Eighty-eight people were killed, the majority of them Egyptians, and over 200 were wounded by the blasts, making the attack the deadliest terrorist action in the country's history.

The bombings coincided with Egypt's Revolution Day, which commemorates Nasser's 1952 overthrow of King Farouk. They were intended to hurt one of Egypt's most important vacation spots, a tourism capital that had billions of dollars invested in it, and achieved that goal as it was registered that many tourists vacated and there were numerous cancellations.

As a response, there were many arrests, especially of the Bedouin in the Sinai who were alleged for aiding the attack, and Egypt started erecting a separation barrier around the city, cutting it off from possible attacks and the nearby Bedouin community.^{[1] (Hebrew)}

Contents 1 Time line 2 Explosion sites 3 Casualties 4 Responsibility 5 Background 6 See also 7 External links

The attacks took place in the early morning hours, at a time when many tourists and locals were still out at restaurants, cafés and bars. The first bomb blast, at 01:15 local time (22:15 UTC), was reported in a market in downtown Sharm; shortly after, another was reported to have hit the Ghazala Gardens hotel, a 176-room four-star establishment in the Naama Bay area, a strip of beachfront hotels some 6 km from the town centre.

The blasts were powerful, shaking windows miles away. Fire and smoke could be seen rising from the explosion sites.

Mustafa Afifi, the governor of Janub Sina', described three separate blasts. While initial news wires spoke of 'up to seven' explosions, most recent news reports also indicate that there were only three explosions:

• One near the bazaar (the "Old Market") in downtown Sharm el Sheikh.
• Taxi Rank, Naama Bay: a bomb in a suitcase exploded in the taxi rank next to the Ocean Bay Hotel.
• Ghazala Gardens Hotel, Naama Bay: a car bomber rammed his vehicle through the glass doors into the lobby at the front of the hotel

Out of the three explosions, only the Ghazala Gardens Hotel bomb hit its target. The other two bombs were intended to be detonated elsewhere (in other hotels/clubs), but the bombers were stopped at security checkpoints and had no option but to detonate themselves in areas without many tourists.

While the official government toll a few days after the blast was put at 64, hospitals reported that 88 people had been killed in the bombings.

The majority of dead and wounded casualties were Egyptians. Among those killed were 11 Britons, two Germans, one Czech, six Italians, one Israeli, and one American. Other casualties, dead and wounded, included foreign visitors from France, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Qatar, Russia, and Spain.

A group calling itself the Abdullah Azzam Brigades (a reference to militant Islamist ideologue Abdullah Yusuf Azzam) was the first to claim responsibility for the attacks. On a website the group stated that "holy warriors targeted the Ghazala Gardens hotel and the Old Market in Sharm el-Sheikh" and claimed it has ties to Al-Qaeda. The authenticity of this statement has not been verified.^[2]

Additional claims were later made by two other groups calling themselves the "Tawhid and Jihad Group in Egypt" and "Holy Warriors of Egypt".^{[citation needed]}

Historically, foreign tourists have been a common target of attacks dating back to the early 1990s. Militants have typically been motivated by a combination of Islamic fundamentalism and opposition to the Mubarak government, and attacking foreigners including non-Muslims while hurting Egypt's tourist trade was seen as serving both goals.

The most bloody attack prior to the Sharm el-Sheikh bombings was the November 1997 Luxor massacre, in which 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians died. In October 2004, a series of bomb attacks killed 34 people in Taba, also on the Sinai Peninsula. In April 2005 Cairo was hit by two days of terrorist violence, in which three foreign tourists were killed.

Unlike the October 2004 attacks, this attack does not appear to have been directed in particular against Israelis, for whom Sharm is a popular destination. However, one Israeli Arab was killed and another, Saneh Hussein, has been reported as being among the injured.

• Suleiman Khater
• 2006 Dahab bombings

• Toll climbs in Egyptian attacks
• Blasts kill 83 in Egyptian Red Sea resort (Reuters)
• Scores die in Sharm El-Sheikh car bombs (Al-Ahram)

• Background
  • Attacks on tourist targets in Egypt, 1992–2005 (Reuters)
  • Egypt's grim catalogue of tourist attacks (Al Jazeera)
  • Tentacles in Sinai The nexus of smuggling, Islamism, and terrorism.