At least 19 people were killed in fierce gunbattles in Lebanon today between soldiers and fighters from a shadowy Palestinian Islamic extremist group accused of having links to both al-Qaeda and the Syrian intelligence services.

Lebanese troops launched an assault on a building in Tripoli where militants from Fatah al-Islam were holed up after a morning of deadly shootouts in the northern port city and and a nearby Palestinian refugee camp. Nicholas Blanford, a Times correspondent on the spot, said that the militants in Tripoli had taken an elderly lady and her daughter hostage.

An army spokesman said 11 soldiers had lost their lives in the fighting, while a total of seven gunmen were reported killed along with a civilian who was caught in the crossfire when troops attacked the building in Tripoli.

Lebanon sent in troop reinforcements to contain the battles which erupted at dawn in Tripoli and around the nearby refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, a Fatah al-Islam stronghold.

The fighting in Tripoli blew up when Lebanese forces tried to arrest a group of Fatah al-Islam militants blamed for a bank robbery in a nearby town yesterday. The sound of gunfire rattled through the streets of the city, where soldiers in jeeps and at least one tank were seen rolling through the streets and plumes of smoke billowed into the sky.

The army said three members of Fatah al-Islam were killed and two arrested in the assault on the building in the residential district of Miteyn, but that other militants were still hiding out in other areas of Tripoli.

A convoy of about 100 troop carriers, jeeps and ambulances estimated to contain between 800 and 1,000 men was seen moving north on the coast road between Beirut and Tripoli, Lebanon’s second largest city which lies about 90 km (55 miles) north of the capital.

The army said several soldiers were also killed and injured in an ambush against a patrol in the coastal village of Qalamun south of Tripoli, although it was not clear if they were included in the overall death toll.

By longstanding convention, the Lebanese police and army do not enter Lebanon’s 12 refugee camps, leaving security there to Palestinian militant groups. Palestinian officials in the camps have expressed mounting concern in recent months about Fatah-al-Islam, which says it is training young Palestinians in Nahr al-Bared to fight “the Jews in Palestine".

Lebanese authorities have accused Fatah al-Islam of working for the Syrian intelligence services and say that it carried out bus bombings in a mountainous Christian area north ofBeirut in February that left three people dead.

The group denies that charge and says that the government is trying to pave the way for an offensive against the Palestinian camps in Lebanon, which house more than half of the country’s nearly 400,000 refugees.

In Beirut, the head of the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority Saad Hariri issued an appeal for calm and called for the population of Tripoli, a mainly Sunni city, to co-operate with the Lebanese army.

Fatah al-Islam is headed by Shaker Abssi, who was born in Jericho in 1955 and said to be linked to the former leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who was killed in a US raid last year. He was sentenced in 2003 to three years in prison in Syria and is now based in the Nahr al-Bared camp, facing a new arrest warrant issued by the authorities in Damascus.

“Fatah al-Islam has no link with the Fatah movement, there is absolutely no connection and they have no right to use the name Fatah,” said Fahmi Zaarir, Fatah spokesman in the occupied West Bank.

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