But analysts suggest that the new government's own violence could diminish its enthusiasm about prosecuting Mr. Mubarak for overseeing a less severe crackdown.
Guy Reifenberg, 37, whose travel agency, Kokopeli, organizes adventure tours, said that the proposed sanctions were less a crackdown on nudity than a way to rein in the excesses of mass tourism, which is currently swamping Barcelona.
No less important, crackdowns could reinforce the autocrats of the Islamic world, making it easier to crush emerging forces of democracy.
"I think it is a message more or less justifying a crackdown," said Omar Ashour, an Egyptian professor of political science at the University of Exeter, in England, who is now in Cairo.
But senior United States military and diplomatic officials said that as more details about the raid emerged, it appeared to be less a concerted crackdown on the dissidents than a police operation gone awry.
That was probably a necessary move, but after the June elections and the violent crackdown, it became less and less tenable.
The government's crackdown came less than two weeks before crucial legislative elections.
Honecker was gone, the new government was in crisis, and every day that passed without violence made a Tiananmen-style crackdown seem less likely.
The timing of their end, too, will probably be similar, coming whenever a major power decides that a crackdown costs less than the nuisance.
On Tuesday state media reported that police had detained 6,000 people during their fourth pre-expo crackdown in less than two months.
