No charm in Sharm

Terror | Sinai attacks undermine economy and may create an election rumble | Mindy Belz

Seven days a week the taxi drivers congregate at the downtown bus station to ferry tourists and Egyptian workers about to disgorge from crowded buses after a six-hour ride from Cairo. The journey crosses the Egyptian desert, the Suez Canal, and traces the length of the Sinai Peninsula, a barren highway where bus drivers hog both lanes, unmindful of the docile Red Sea on the right or rocky scarps to the left leading up to Mt. Sinai. Riders pass the time enduring B movies on old videotape complete with cheap anti-American jokes.

Now the taxi drivers wait for tourists who will not come. The resort area's bus station was near one of three sites bombed in the pre-dawn hours of July 23 by terrorists driving pickup trucks, their explosives buried under vegetables. The bombs went off in quick succession, first detonating in the middle of a street lined with stores, restaurants, and cafés near the bus station, then ripping through the luxury Ghazala Gardens hotel before a third blast near the Moevenpick Hotel and other stores. The attacks killed at least 88—Egyptians and foreigners (including one American)—and sent vacationers to what has been a booming idyll crowding into lobbies with their suitcases.