Hotel ripped apart at breakfast

The hotel was named Paradise for good reason, but today terrorists turned it into an inferno of charred bodies and blasted rubble.

Habib Hakem, the Mombasa Paradise hotel's water sports manager, was at home when the horror happened. He was called to the city's Pandya hospital to find 12 of his colleagues and six Israeli tourists swathed in bandages. There were similar scenes in hospitals around Mombasa as doctors tried to cope with dozens of injured.

"They have many cuts, broken hands, broken arms. It is horrible," said Mr Hakem 30. "I know these people, I work with them."

The Kenyan continued: "I spoke to them and they don't really remember anything. Only seeing a big explosion and then the hotel falling in on them. They were dug out of the rubble. Now we're trying to get blood for transfusions, but it's difficult. There is no blood.

"It's a bad thing. Our hotel is popular with Israeli tourists. It's a beautiful hotel, it is paradise - like its name - and this is a terrible thing to happen to it."

For Mr Hakem's guests it should have been the trip of a lifetime. Pensioners, parents and children were looking forward to days of safari tours and sunkissed beaches overlooking the Indian ocean.

But at 8am local time (5am GMT), as many of the guests would have been coming down for breakfast, the worst thing imaginable happened.

While families and staff milled around the hotel lobby, a car crashed through a security barrier outside. The noise of steel on steel alerted them to something dreadful about to happen. Then people inside the car appeared to throw explosives from the windows. An enormous explosion followed, ripping apart the lobby and ground floor, destroying three-quarters of the building.

Caught in the blast was a party of Israeli tourists checking in at the start of their holiday. As the dust cleared, the extent of the carnage became all too clear: at least 11 dead and and many, many more injured - children celebrating their bar mitzvah among the casualties.

Kenya has been targeted by terrorists in the past, with al Qaeda blamed for the devastating attack on the US embassy in Nairobi. But the African country has long been a favoured destination for tourists and until recently was regarded as safe and stable.

The 230-room Mombasa Paradise advertises itself as one of the most elegant on the coast north of the Kenyan port city. Set in superbly-kept gardens, where there are swimming pools with bars set in the middle, it has four floodlit tennis courts, a fitness centre, squash court, football field, two volleyball courts, table tennis rooms, a billiard room and full watersports centre, which includes a diving school and windsurfing lessons.

The hotel's rooms overlook the pristine waters of the Indian Ocean.

But the picture this morning was in horrific contrast to the idyll of the tourist brochures.

Rescue workers struggled to reach the injured beneath the debris. Ambulances screamed to a halt outside the hotel before ferrying the dead, dying and those destined to survive to hospital. Crowds milled around the damaged building.

One guest, identified as Osnat, told reporters that a number of children had been hurt.

Shortly after the blast, Israeli officials arrived at the hotel to protect the remaining guests.

The Mombasa Paradise is well-liked by Israelis and planes fly regularly from the Jewish state to the city's airport.

It was one of these planes, chartered by the Israeli airline Arkia, that had brought many of the tourists to their holiday destination at 11am yesterday. Today the same plane was targeted by two missiles as it took off for its return journey to Tel Aviv - about the same time that the hotel was attacked.

Israeli Aharon Hammel, who owns a hotel near the Paradise, said shortly after the attack: "I can see the bodies of local residents. I don't know about the Israelis. The whole hotel is burned. The whole hotel. There is a lot of smoke."