CAIRO, Oct 9 (AFP) - Egypt said Saturday no option should be ruled out in investigating the bombings that killed at least 34 people in Red Sea resorts and charged that Israel had hastily singled out Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.
"Egypt views this evaluation by the Israeli side as being very hasty ... I cannot reach the same conclusion at this stage, because we don't know who perpetrated these actions," said presidential spokesman Magid Abdul Fattah.
"Taba is very close to the Israeli border," he pointed out, in reference to the resort where a suicide car bomber rammed into a luxury hotel in which scores of Israelis were spending the Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
Although officials on both sides were still struggling to determine the identities of the victims, most of them were thought to be Israelis.
"Why should we insist on Al-Qaeda and ignore the other groups who claimed responsibility for the incident," Abdul Fattah asked after a meeting between Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Israeli officials put the blame squarely on Al-Qaeda, although two other previously-unknown organisations -- the Islamic Unity Brigades and the World Islamist Group -- also claimed responsibility for the attacks, both of them mentioning Israel's policies against the Palestinians as a motive.
A group calling itself Brigades of the Martyr Abdullah Azzam and claiming to be part of the militant Al-Qaeda network took responsibility for the blasts in a statement posted on an Islamist website.
"The Brigades of the Martyr Abdullah Azzam give our Arab and Islamic nation the good news of the heroic martyrdom operations in Egypt, through which our sons in the squad of the leader martyr cleansed the land of Taba from the filth of the Jews," said the statement, whose authenticity could not be verified.
Islamic Jihad and Hamas, the two Palestinian militants groups responsible for most of the deadliest attacks against Israel since the start of the intifada four years ago, denied any involvement.