Not long after 1 a.m., two powerful car bombs tore through the summer night. The first rocked the Old Market, a knot of strip malls adorned with Roman arches and flush with souvenir shops. The blast tore through a patch of pavement where microbuses load up for trips, and the damage was flung in a wide arc.

"Those are the buses that all the Egyptians use to go back home," said Osama Ahmed, a 25-year-old merchant who huddled in a slim wedge of shade Saturday to watch investigators pore over the twisted cars. "We saw bodies without arms, without legs. It was an untold scene. Horrible."

Around the same time, a second automobile rigged with explosives raced up the driveway to the sprawling Ghazala Gardens Hotel, slammed its way into the reception hall and blew up. The luxury hotel had been packed with vacationers gathered in the bar, in the Italian restaurant and in the lobby.

"I saw a lot of panic, a lot of running, a lot of smoke," said Samy Negah, an Egyptian journalist vacationing here. "I saw bodies on the ground, dead people."

In the third attack, a bomb might have been hidden in a bag and abandoned at a taxi stand where frightened tourists had dashed after the first bombs went off. Several witnesses said they saw a man drop the bag onto the ground and jump into a taxi.

"I saw some guy rushing, saying, 'Taxi, taxi, taxi.' He threw a bag outside the car and then he drove away," said Mohamed Mustafa, a 27-year-old cafeteria worker who was walking his dog past the taxi stand.

Mustafa said he didn't think much of the abandoned bag at the time. All around him, people were panicked, behaving irrationally. Then the bomb went off.

In style and geography, the attacks echoed a series of coordinated bombings that erupted in the Sinai resorts of Taba and Nuweiba in October, killing 34 people. Because those resorts lay close to the Israeli border, and because many of the victims were Israeli tourists, some Egyptian officials argued that the blasts were an outgrowth of the Palestinian intifada rather than a salvo in an internal struggle.

But Interior Minister Habib Adli, who surveyed the damage Saturday and called the strikes "an ugly act of terrorism," told reporters that the attack probably was linked to the October bombings. "We have some clues, especially about the car that was exploded in the Old Market, and investigators are pursuing (them)," he said.

The first group to claim responsibility for the weekend attacks calls itself the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, al-Qaida, in Syria and Egypt. The same organization claimed responsibility for the October bombings and for a pair of minor attacks that struck tourist sites in Cairo this spring.

The second claim emerged a few hours later when the previously unknown Holy Warriors of Egypt faxed a statement to newspapers saying it had carried out the attacks.