Cairo, February 23 : The Supreme Council of Antiquities, part of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, has announced the discovery of an intact wooden and limestone sarcophagi housing dozens of mummies inside the Sixth-Dynasty tomb of Sennedjem in the Saqqara necropolis.

Members of the public were given the first glimpse of the latest discovery of ancient Egyptian treasure to be found in Saqqara on Wednesday.

SCA Secretary-General Zahi Hawass revealed that two weeks ago, during a routine excavation work at the mastaba of the Sixth-Dynasty lector-priest Sennedjem, their archaeologists stumbled upon a cache of mummies of the 26th Dynasty, Egypt''s last independent Kingdom before it was overrun by a succession of foreign conquerors.

Gaza  - Palestinian paramedics extracted a body from a tunnel beneath Egypt's border with Gaza Strip Sunday, medical officials said, bringing to four the number of dead in the tunnel, with a fifth person missing.

It was unclear whether the four died as a result of poison gas canisters Egyptian security forces tossed into the tunnel on Saturday, or wether they were killed in an Israeli bomb raid.

Egypt has beefed up security measures along its border with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip since the end of Israel's 22-day offensive against militants in the salient, and Israel regularly launches air raids on the scores of tunnels which run under the Gaza strip border with the Sinai peninsula.

Rafah, Egypt  - Egypt partially opened its border crossing with the Gaza Strip on Sunday morning, Palestinian and Egyptian officials told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The crossing at the town of Rafah, which is bisected by the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt, will be open for three days to allow medical patients, their family members, doctors and journalists stranded on both sides of the border to cross.

An Egyptian security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, told dpa that a total of some 3,300 Palestinians, including approximately 800 students at universities in Egypt and other Arab countries, would cross the border over the next three days.

Gaza - An inter-Palestinian reconciliation dialogue between the rival Fatah and Hamas movements will begin in Cairo next Wednesday, a senior Palestinian official said Saturday.

Azzam al-Ahmed, head of the Fatah bloc in the Palestinian parliament, told reporters his movement had received an official invitation from Egypt to join the dialogue.

The Gaza-based Ramattan news agency also quoted an Egyptian Foreign Ministry official as saying Cairo had issued invitations to the Palestinian factions.

Al-Arish, Egypt  - One man was killed and another was injured on Friday when a fire broke out in a tunnel used to smuggle petrol from Egypt to the Gaza Strip, a security source told Deutsche Presse- Agentur dpa.

The tunnel, which was used to smuggle petrol into the Gaza Strip through plastic pipes, caught fire on Friday morning, the security source said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media.

Luxor, Egypt - Five crew members were killed when their Ukrainian cargo aircraft caught fire on the tarmac at Luxor airport in southern Egypt Friday, local aviation authorities have said.