Cairo, Egypt ? Three car bombs exploded in quick succession in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik early this morning, ripping through a hotel and a cafe packed with European and Egyptian tourists. The province governor said at least 49 people died in the deadliest attack in Egypt in nearly a decade.

The powerful blasts, beginning at 1:15 a.m., rattled windows miles away and sent panicked vacationers streaming out of hotels and clubs. Smoke and fire rose from Naama Bay, a main strip of beach hotels in the desert city at the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, also popular with Israeli tourists, witnesses said.

Dazed tourists milled about the darkened streets as Egyptian rescuers searched for dead and injured. Bodies of the dead lay under white sheets or were loaded in plastic bags into ambulances, while other emergency vehicles sped away with the wounded.

“There seemed to be a lot of bodies strewn across the road” near one cafe, Chris Reynolds, a policeman visiting from Birmingham, England, told the BBC by telephone. “It was horrendous.”

One of the explosives-laden cars smashed through security into the front driveway of the Ghazala Gardens hotel and exploded, said South Sinai province’s governor, Mustafa Afifi – suggesting it was a suicide bomber, though he did not specify that.

Emergency workers load a victim in an ambulance this morning following an explosion in Egypt's Red Sea resort of Sham el-Sheik in this image from television.

Large swaths of the front walls of the hotel – a sprawling 176-room resort complex about three stories tall and surrounded by gardens – were collapsed and burned. The reception area was “completely burned down, destroyed,” Amal Mustafa, 28, an Egyptian visiting Sharm with her family, told The Associated Press after driving by the site.

A second car bomb exploded in a parking area near the Movenpick Hotel, also in Naama Bay, said a receptionist there who declined to identify himself.

The third detonated at a minibus parking lot in the Old Market, an area about 2 1/2 miles away, killing 17 people – believed to be Egyptians – sitting at a nearby outdoor coffee shop, said a security official in the operations control room in Cairo monitoring the crisis. Three minibuses were set ablaze. It was not clear if they were carrying passengers, the official said.

After the blast, “I went to my balcony and saw fire and smoke rising from the car that exploded, which was a taxi,” said Ibrahim al-Said, 35, a Sudanese man who lives in the Old Market.

Afifi, speaking to the state news agency, put the toll at 49 killed. Security officials said around 200 were wounded. They – like the crisis control room official – spoke on condition of anonymity because they were releasing information not yet announced by the Interior Ministry. The ministry’s toll stood at 31 dead and 107 wounded.

The control room official had initially said as many as seven blasts may have gone off, four of them car bombs, but he later corrected that report, saying witnesses and police had been thrown off by echoes and secondary blasts.

The dead included British, Russian, Dutch, Kuwaitis, Saudis, Qataris and Egyptians, a security official said.

The attacks came nine months after a series of explosions hit several hotels in the Sinai resorts of Taba and Ras Shitan, about 100 miles northwest on the Israel border. Egyptian authorities said that attack, which killed 34 and prompted a wave of arrests in Sinai, was linked to Israeli-Palestinian violence.