Cairo - Prominent Islamist lawyers alleged Wednesday that Egyptian security forces conducted a campaign of mass arrests in the wake of a bombing that struck a popular tourist area in Cairo in February.

Mamdouh Ismail, a former member of the armed Islamist group Islamic Jihad and now a defence attorney specialising in terrorism-related cases, on Wednesday told the German Press Agency dpa that "at least 100 Salafists,"

Gaza City/Cairo - Negotiators from rival Palestinian factions were due to resume talks in Cairo aimed at establishing a "national unity" government on Wednesday, representatives of the factions and Egyptian officials said.

Delegates from Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, and from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction, which controls the West Bank, arrived in Cairo Tuesday night and had preliminary talks ahead of a wider meeting including representatives from other factions.

Washington, April 1: A new study has suggested that some of Egypt's most magnificent pyramids were deliberately designed to follow a pattern of invisible diagonal lines, which would point towards Heliopolis, the city of the Sun God.

These invisible lines would connect most of the funerary complexes raised by the kings of the Old Kingdom between 2630 and 2323 BC, Giulio Magli, professor of archaeoastronomy at Milan's Polytechnic University, told Discovery News.

Cairo  - At least four people were killed and 15 others injured when a tour bus crashed in Egypt's Sinai peninsula, police and medics said on Monday.

All of the dead were Egyptians, but the injured included people "of various nationalities," police told the German Press Agency dpa.

Most of the wounded were rushed to hospitals in Nakhil, in central Sinai, medics said, but five of the injured passengers were in critical condition and were rushed to a larger hospital in Suez.

Doha/Cairo - Egyptian and Qatari diplomats on Saturday shrugged off the decision of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to absent himself from the annual Arab League summit in Doha scheduled for Monday.

The announcement that Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit made in Cairo early Saturday to declare Mubarak's decision to delegate Moufid Shehab, a cabinet minister, to head the Egyptian delegation to the summit was simply, in both capitals, expected.

Cairo  - Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak will not attend the Arab summit in Doha scheduled on March 30-31, the State Middle East News Agency (MENA) quoted Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit as saying on Saturday.

Aboul-Gheit did not indicate the reason for Mubarak's non- attendance at the meeting, which was to review issues of reconciliation within the Arab camp, although a rift over Doha's diplomatic stances is believed to be behind the announcement.

Egypt is to send a lower-level delegation to Doha.