Semiramis InterContinental Hotel: No help came

This section was posted by Chritian Science Monitor on  Janauary 29th 2013.  begin quote:
Last night, the Semiramis InterContinental Hotel on the Nile corniche in downtown Cairo was attacked for hours by armed thugs, one of whom was wielding a semi-automatic weapon. The staff's panicked calls to the police and the Army were ignored for hours. The hotel is within a mile of Tahrir Square, the US and other foreign embassies, and a slew of other five-star hotels and multinational offices. Here's how Ahram Online described the scene:

Ahmed Ibrahim, another InterContinental guard described 40 men armed with birdshot guns, knives and a semi-automatic weapon, approach the hotel around 2.30am. They succeeded in breaking through the hotel's fortified shutters. Ahram Online reporter saw electrical wire tied to the metal gates, clearly used to force the doors open. "One had a semi-automatic gun and started shooting inside the building, I was inside trying to hide and call the police, it was terrifying," Abdel-Wahab continues.
Some guests trapped in the hotel, locked themselves in their rooms to avoid the tear gas and bullets, as employees desperately struggled to evacuate the building. After the police failed to appear, Abdel-Wahab says, hotel staff phoned the army. "However they didn't arrive, they left us."
"It was terrible - I was scared to death," recalls Nabila Samak, Director of Marketing and Communications, who made the desperate calls for help from the hotel Twitter account. Samak added that Semiramis staff had even resorted to calling Egyptian TV talk shows to draw attention to their plight.

Yes, the hotel's director of marketing was reduced to issuing panicked calls for help via Twitter (for instance: "PLEASE SEND HELP! SOS"). Soldiers eventually arrived and no one was injured. But the hotel is now closed, and a message has been sent to potential tourists and investors alike that even in the heart of Cairo, the state is not up to the task of providing basic security at the moment.

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Egypt shudders, with leadership nowhere in sight