State-owned newspapers also reported on Sunday that one of the three suicide bombers who blew themselves up in the Red Sea resort of Dahab on April 24 had been identified and his brother arrested.
The armed clashes erupted at dawn in the Jabal Al Maghara region in northern Sinai as police encircled an area where they believed suspects were holed up, the interior ministry said in a statement. One of the suspects was killed, the statement said. Two security officials also said that several suspects were detained in the raid.
The Jabal Maghara area is close to Sheikh Zuayed, which is one of the main towns in northern Sinai and the home of at least one of the suicide bombers, the sources said.
Newspapers said one of the bombers, Atallah Al Swerki, concealed the explosives under a load of fruit on a pick-up van which he used to reach the southern Sinai diving resort last Monday.
"Ibrahim, the brother of terrorist Atallah Al Swerki, was arrested by the security services in northern Sinai," the state-owned Al Gumhuriya daily said. "He helped his brother take the explosives towards Dahab, before heading back to the Sheikh Zuayed area," the newspaper added, quoting security sources.
The driver of the vehicle, named by newspapers as Mohammed Shehta, was also arrested and questioned as part of the investigation, the official news agency MENA reported. Investigators suspect all three bombers are from the same area but are still in the process of confirming the identities of two of them.
Interior Minister Habib Al Adly had said that the same north Sinai group was responsible for the Dahab bombings and two other failed suicide attacks on security personnel further north on Wednesday.
According to Attorney General Maher Abdel Wahed, the final toll for the bombings in Dahab - which struck at a peak holiday season - stands at 18 killed and 90 wounded. Twelve Egyptians were killed as well as six foreigners - two Russians, a German child, a Swiss national, a Yemeni and a Hungarian. The attacks, the third such bombings on the same tourist-packed coastline in 18 months, also left 58 Egyptians and 32 foreigners wounded.
The Egyptian authorities have charged the same group was also responsible for the July 2005 attacks that killed some 70 people in Sharm El Sheikh and those further up the coast that left 34 dead in October 2004. Both previous spates of attacks were followed by major raids in the Sinai, a vast desert and mountainous expanse mainly inhabited by Bedouin tribes.
Intense fighting between police forces and armed bedouins took place in Jabal Halal, near Jabal Al Maghara, in the aftermath of the Sharm El Sheikh attacks. Several suspects and special police forces were killed in the raids, during which thousands of bedouins were rounded up.
UPDATE, APR. 30: Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif on Sunday asked parliament to extend the state of 24-year emergency by two years, a controversial measure he justified with the recent wave of bombings and communal clashes. "The sectarian incidents and terrorist operations Egypt has witnessed recently have led us to ask for the extension," Nazif told the People's Assembly.
Suicide bombers struck Dahab on April 24. Two failed suicide attacks were carried out against security personnel two days later, further north in Sinai. Violent clashes also broke out earlier this month in Alexandria between Muslims and the Coptic Christian minority.
The Emergency Law was imposed in 1981 following the assassination of president Anwar Al Sadat.
© 2006 Agence France-Presse
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