A third member of a US interception team died yesterday from wounds sustained in the attack, a US Navy spokesman said.
"Three are now dead, two US navy and one US Coast Guard," said Navy Commander James Graybeal, a spokesman for the Fifth Fleet, yesterday in Bahrain.
The US Coast Guard member died from his injuries at the Kuwait Military Hospital, he said.
US military officials in the Gulf were sending a team of investigators to try to determine the launching point of the attacks, he said.
Asked whether the attackers arrived at the port by traveling from inside Iraq or from Iran or Kuwait, Graybeal said, "That's what were trying to determine."
It was the first time since last spring's US-led invasion that anti-coalition insurgents had used suicide bombers to strike at oil facilities off Iraq's southern coast.
Previously insurgents had concentrated their attacks on Iraq's northern oilfields, repeatedly hitting the main export pipeline to Turkey in a bid to stop desperately needed hard currency revenues.
That pipeline passes through predominantly Sunni Muslim areas north of Baghdad, where the Iraq insurgency has been at its most ferocious since the ouster of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated regime.
By contrast, Basra is Shiite-dominated and until this month had been relatively docile in its approach to the US-led occupation.
Bahr al-Ulloum said that the Al-Basra Oil Terminal will open today at the soonest.
The Al-Basra terminal unloads up to 900,000 barrels a day of Iraq's total current exports of around 1.6 million barrels per day, he said.
The minister would not say how much that production was worth.
In other developments, Australian Prime Minister John Howard's surprise trip coincided with the country's main veterans' commemoration, which honors troops who fought in World War I's ill-fated Gallipoli campaign.
Accompanied by the commander of coalition ground forces, US Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, Howard attended a ceremony at Baghdad International Airport to mark Anzac Day.
Also traveling to Iraq yesterday was Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov, who visited his country's 485 troops.
Parvanov's trip came two days after a Bulgarian soldier was killed in the city of Karbala, the sixth since the war began.
Parvanov also met Polish General Mieczyslaw Bieniek, the commander of the 9,500-strong international force that patrols a swath of south-central Iraq.
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Strzelecki, a spokesman for the force, said Parvanov promised that the Bulgarian contingent will continue its mission and also said he was "interested in seeing greater security for the base."
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Howard stays with soldiers in Iraq for Gallipoli service
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