It's a horrible scene: half a dozen cafes and shopfronts have been completely blown out; the seaside promenade, newly paved in pink and white, is covered in splashes of blood.

The locals and the volunteers helping with the clean-up say that everyone was expecting a bomb attack here sooner or later after the deadly strikes on Taba, back in October 2004, and Sharm el-Sheikh in July.

"It was a case of when," said Paul McBeath, 42, a Glasgow-born diving instructor who moved to the resort five years ago.

"The night before I'd been sitting around with a beer, talking with friends about the bombings in Taba and Sharm. We are in the middle of them. It was inevitable."

Mr McBeath said that he was at home a few hundred yards away when the three blasts went off almost simultaneously. at 7:15pm. He ran immediately to the Red Sea Relax office, near where one of the bombs went off. One of his Egyptian colleagues had been thrown across the street by the blast.

"I arrived as the sirens were going off. People were running around. It was chaos," he said. "Everyone was on the streets, throwing bodies and injured people onto pick-up trucks and driving them to hopsital.

"It was crazy, crazy. I saw two bodies lying right in front of me."

Dahab is a low-budget backpackers' resort that is being upgraded to capture the more affluent tourists, served by a newly-built Hilton and other resort hotels well away from the internet cafe, henna and massage parlours and trinket shops popular with the divers, windsurfers and hippies.

There are believed to be about 100 British holidaymakers in Dahab at the moment. Thomson Holidays, the UK’s biggest tour operator, said its 43 customers at the Iberotol and Hilton hotels are safe and planning to continue with their holidays.

One of the three bombs that went off almost simultaneously targeted was the Al Capone restaurant, once one of the resort's most popular spots but now destroyed.

"The tables and chairs have gone, there is nothing left," said Joseph Nazir, who owns a safari company in the town. "Everybody is panicking, a lot of people are crying. We will be affected by this for a long, long time."

Hani Sadeq, 24, works at the Mona Lisa jewellery store and initially thought that a power generator had blown up. He ran towards the scene and found people, including friends, lying on the ground.

"Some were already dead. Some were alive, with arms broken. We took them to the hospital," he said. "I wish we knew who did it. If I saw him, I would tear him apart.. Dahab is dead now."

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