The security source would not identify the man's nationality, but said police expect to catch him shortly. It was not clear if the man was connected with the attacks, though.

Immediately after the bombing, the source said, Egyptian police questioned 500 to 600 people in the Taba area.

The Interior Ministry has also issued orders prohibiting parking near hotels frequented by tourists and deploying bomb-sniffing dogs and bomb detection units to such hotels.

Attackers struck the Taba Hilton and nearby camping areas around Ras al Sultan and Tarabeen in a series of bomb blasts.

Nine of the dead are Egyptians, five are Israelis and 20 remain unidentified, said the Egyptian Interior Ministry in a press release.

Rescuers continued to search the wreckage of the hotel on Sunday for body parts and any more survivors.

More bodies are feared to be buried in the rubble of the luxury hotel at Taba, on the Israeli border. It was the target of the biggest of a series of explosions on the eastern coast of the Sinai Peninsula.

"Hope is our fuel. We are hoping there is a pocket of air where someone could be alive," Col. Gideon Bar-on, commander of the Israeli army rescue unit, told Reuters on Saturday.

He said that in the past, his team has found survivors of earthquakes days after buildings collapsed.

One charred corpse, its clothing still smoldering, was pulled out of the broken masonry and taken away in an Egyptian Red Crescent vehicle. Ultra-Orthodox Jewish workers sifted the wreckage to gather all the human remains for burial.

"It could take days for this fog on the details and identities to clear up," Bar-on said, adding that he expected that 10 more bodies could be pulled out.

Most were killed in the car bomb in Taba, but two Israelis died in one of two near simultaneous bombings further south. Egypt's official news agency said 149 people were wounded. Three claims

Two terrorism analysts told CNN they suspected Egyptian Jihad, a group that merged with al Qaeda in the late 1990s.

But Israeli officials said it was not yet clear who was responsible, and U.S. officials warned against jumping to any conclusions.

Three different, little-known or previously unknown groups have claimed responsibility for the bombings.

All three claims appeared on Islamist Web sites. The third came from a group that said it was associated with al Qaeda. CNN cannot authenticate any of the claims.

Witnesses to the explosion at the 400-room Hilton Hotel at Taba -- a Red Sea resort just across Egypt's border with Israel, about 100 yards from a border crossing point -- said there were many children inside when the building's west side was demolished.

A senior Israeli government source said one blast was caused by a truck bomb, set off when a truck crashed through the hotel lobby, and there may have been a second attack by a suicide bomber near the hotel pool.

The bombing in Taba marked the deadliest terrorist attack on an Israeli target outside of Israel.

The Israeli government had warned its citizens not to travel to the Sinai Peninsula during the Jewish religious holiday period, citing information that suggested possible plans for a terrorist attack. But Israel said about 15,000 traveled to the region anyway.

CNN's John Vause and Ben Wedeman contributed to this story.

http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/11/egypt.explosions/index.html