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.

Three suspects were killed during the day-long exchanges, security sources said, adding that one of the dead men was believed to be Nasr Khamis al-Milahi, on the wanted list since previous deadly bombings in Sinai in October 2004 and July 2005.

Other suspects were detained in the raid, security sources added.

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-Gomhuriya 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 MENA news agency reported.

Investigators suspect all three bombers came 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.

"The sectarian incidents and terrorist operations Egypt has witnessed recently have led us to ask for the extension" as of June 1, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif told the People's Assembly before the vote.

Three suicide bombers struck the Red Sea resort of Dahab on April 24, killing 18 other people and wounding 90. 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 after a knife-wielding assailant attacked worshippers in several churches.

Nazif asked for the state of emergency to be renewed for "two years only or until a new anti-terrorist law is passed, which will require constitutional amendments."

Three quarters of the 378 lawmakers present in the 454-strong parliament voted in favour of the two-year extension, while 91 voted against.

The renewal needed a two-thirds majority to be passed and the ruling National Democratic Party controls around three quarters of the chamber.

Muslim Brotherhood MPs shouted slogans as the vote got under way, some of them wearing scarves inscribed with the words "No to the state of emergency."

The state of emergency has been imposed almost continuously since 1967 and been renewed every three years under President Hosni Mubarak's 25-year-old rule.

During his campaign for the September 2005 presidential election, Mubarak promised to abolish the state of emergency.

But the 77-year-old president said in a recent interview that new counter-terrorism legislation would be needed to replace exception laws and that it could take up to two years to draft.

"The state of emergency does not eliminate terrorism but it facilitates the work of the security forces in their attempt to protect our homeland," Nazif told lawmakers Sunday.

"President Mubarak wants stability for the Egyptian people and this will only be possible when total security is achieved in the country, which will require the extension of the state of emergency until anti-terrorist legislation is adopted," he added.

Egyptian security forces are involved in vast security operations in Sinai to hunt down the perpetrators of last Monday's triple suicide bombings.

Similar sweeps, during which thousands of Bedouins were detained, were launched following the Sharm el-Sheikh bombings in July 2005.

The abolition of the emergency laws -- which grant security forces sweeping powers of arrest and restrict non-government political activity -- have been the focal point of opposition parties in Egypt over the past year.

Rights groups and political opponents had warned that the government would seek to use the latest unrest in Egypt to justify extending the state of emergency.

"They are backtracking on promises of removing the law. Now members of parliament are experiencing a government terror after the Dahab terror," Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Issam al-Aryan told AFP.

"If they do extend it, it is a bad sign. They say it is against terrorism and drugs, but this law has been abused," Aryan said.

The Muslim Brothers, who hold a fifth of seats in parliament, have recently launched a major campaign against the state of emergency and argued that it has been unsuccessful in combating terrorism.

Egypt's tourist hub of Sinai has been hit by three deadly spates of bombings in the past 18 months.

The Americans, my interlocutor suspected, are trying to provoke an Iraqi civil war so that Sunni Muslim insurgents spend their energies killing their Shia co-religionists rather than soldiers of the Western occupation forces. "I swear to you that we have very good information," my source says, finger stabbing the air in front of him. "One young Iraqi man told us that he was trained by the Americans as a policeman in Baghdad and he spent 70 per cent of his time learning to drive and 30 per cent in weapons training. They said to him: 'Come back in a week.' When he went back, they gave him a mobile phone and told him to drive into a crowded area near a mosque and phone them. He waited in the car but couldn't get the right mobile signal. So he got out of the car to where he received a better signal. Then his car blew up."

Impossible, I think to myself. But then I remember how many times Iraqis in Baghdad have told me similar stories. These reports are believed even if they seem unbelievable. And I know where much of the Syrian information is gleaned: from the tens of thousands of Shia Muslim pilgrims who come to pray at the Sayda Zeinab mosque outside Damascus. These men and women come from the slums of Baghdad, Hillah and Iskandariyah as well as the cities of Najaf and Basra. Sunnis from Fallujah and Ramadi also visit Damascus to see friends and relatives and talk freely of American tactics in Iraq.

"There was another man, trained by the Americans for the police. He too was given a mobile and told to drive to an area where there was a crowd - maybe a protest - and to call them and tell them what was happening. Again, his new mobile was not working. So he went to a landline phone and called the Americans and told them: 'Here I am, in the place you sent me and I can tell you what's happening here.' And at that moment there was a big explosion in his car."

Just who these "Americans" might be, my source did not say. In the anarchic and panic-stricken world of Iraq, there are many US groups - including countless outfits supposedly working for the American military and the new Western-backed Iraqi Interior Ministry - who operate outside any laws or rules. No one can account for the murder of 191 university teachers and professors since the 2003 invasion - nor the fact that more than 50 former Iraqi fighter-bomber pilots who attacked Iran in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war have been assassinated in their home towns in Iraq in the past three years.

Amid this chaos, a colleague of my source asked me, how could Syria be expected to lessen the number of attacks on Americans inside Iraq? "It was never safe, our border," he said. "During Saddam's time, criminals and Saddam's terrorists crossed our borders to attack our government. I built a wall of earth and sand along the border at that time. But three car bombs from Saddam's agents exploded in Damascus and Tartous- I was the one who captured the criminals responsible. But we couldn't stop them."

Now, he told me, the rampart running for hundreds of miles along Syria's border with Iraq had been heightened. "I have had barbed wire put on top and up to now we have caught 1,500 non-Syrian and non-Iraqi Arabs trying to cross and we have stopped 2,700 Syrians from crossing ... Our army is there - but the Iraqi army and the Americans are not there on the other side."

Behind these grave suspicions in Damascus lies the memory of Saddam's long friendship with the United States. "Our Hafez el-Assad [the former Syrian president who died in 2000] learnt that Saddam, in his early days, met with American officials 20 times in four weeks. This convinced Assad that, in his words, 'Saddam is with the Americans'. Saddam was the biggest helper of the Americans in the Middle East (when he attacked Iran in 1980) after the fall of the Shah. And he still is! After all, he brought the Americans to Iraq!"

So I turn to a story which is more distressing for my sources: the death by shooting of Brigadier General Ghazi Kenaan, former head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon - an awesomely powerful position - and Syrian Minister of Interior when his suicide was announced by the Damascus government last year.

Widespread rumours outside Syria suggested that Kenaan was suspected by UN investigators of involvement in the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri in a massive car bomb in Beirut last year - and that he had been "suicided" by Syrian government agents to prevent him telling the truth.

Not so, insisted my original interlocutor. "General Ghazi was a man who believed he could give orders and anything he wanted would happen. Something happened that he could not reconcile - something that made him realise he was not all-powerful. On the day of his death, he went to his office at the Interior Ministry and then he left and went home for half an hour. Then he came back with a pistol. He left a message for his wife in which he said goodbye to her and asked her to look after their children and he said that what he was going to do was 'for the good of Syria'. Then he shot himself in the mouth."

Of Hariri's assassination, Syrian officials like to recall his relationship with the former Iraqi interim prime minister Iyad Alawi - a self-confessed former agent for the CIA and MI6 - and an alleged $20bn arms deal between the Russians and Saudi Arabia in which they claim Hariri was involved.

Hariri's Lebanese supporters continue to dismiss the Syrian argument on the grounds that Syria had identified Hariri as the joint author with his friend, French President Jacques Chirac, of the UN Security Council resolution which demanded the retreat of the Syrians from Lebanese territory.

But if the Syrians are understandably obsessed with the American occupation of Iraq, their long hatred for Saddam - something which they shared with most Iraqis - is still intact. When I asked my first "security" source what would happen to the former Iraqi dictator, he replied, banging his fist into his hand: "He will be killed. He will be killed. He will be killed."