Mubarak vows to win own 'war on terror' after Sinai attacks

"The country's security represents a red line that I will not allow anyone to cross," Mubarak said, three days after triple suicide attacks in the Red Sea resort of Dahab left at least 18 dead.

"We will win our battle against terrorism. We will besiege it, uproot it and dry up its sources," he said in a televised May Day speech, vowing to use "the full force of the law" to defeat terrorists.

On Wednesday, two suicide bombers also targeted security personnel from the Multinational Force and Observers and Egyptian police further north in the Sinai, causing no injuries.

Egyptian Interior Minister Habib al-Adly blamed this week's attacks on a radical Islamic group he believes was also responsible for two other gruesome bombings in Red Sea resorts over the past 18 months.

"The information indicates that the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks that occurred in Dahab and al-Gura are Sinai bedouins," Adly told state television late Wednesday.

"They also have connections to previous incidents in Taba and Sharm el-Sheikh," the minister said.

Security officials have said investigators believe the five suicide attacks executed in a span of 48 hours were perpetrated by Bedouins from northern Sinai, which is where the MFO is stationed, close to 400 kilometres (250 miles) north of Dahab.

Egypt accuses a group called Tawhid wal Jihad (Unification and holy war) of carrying out the July 2005 Sharm el-Sheikh attacks that killed some 70 people and multiple bombings further up the coast in Taba that left 34 dead in October 2004.

Tawhid wal Jihad was the name of Islamic extremist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's organisation before it was renamed Al-Qaeda in Iraq in late 2004.

Adly said security reinforcements were dispatched to Sinai, a vast desert and mountainous expanse inhabited mainly by Bedouin tribes.

Previous attacks in Sinai were followed by tough crackdowns and thousands of arrests in the peninsula.

The Dahab attacks came a day before Sinai Liberation Day, a public holiday which celebrates Israel's 1982 withdrawal from the peninsula, in what many analysts saw as evidence that the perpetrators were from a local group with an Egyptian agenda.

The Sharm el-Sheikh and October 2004 attacks also were timed to coincide with key dates in Egyptian history. The spate of bombings mark the first major threat to state security since Egypt crushed an Islamist insurgency in the 1990s.

The most common hypothesis put forward by security experts and commentators is that of a new home-grown Islamist cell, that could be an Al-Qaeda "franchise" without necessarily receiving direct support from Osama bin Laden's network.

Preliminary findings from the investigation revealed that the bombs used in the Dahab attacks were rudimentary and made with materials locally available.

However, the top-selling state-owned daily Al-Ahram quoted security sources as saying that the same group responsible for the Sinai bombings were planning attacks against Israelis and Americans in Iraq.

Investigators have been running DNA tests to match body parts with ID cards found on the scene of some of the explosions.

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