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Middle East and North Africa

Police checkpoint in Cairo attacked by unidentified assailants

Two police officers were injured

© EPA/KHALED ELFIQI

CAIRO, November 25. /ITAR-TASS /. Two Egyptian police officers have been injured on Monday as a result of an attack on a police checkpoint in Cairo. According to local media reports, the incident occurred at dawn near the presidential palace Al Qubbah in the Al Matar metropolitan area.

Unidentified motorcyclists threw a homemade bomb at the law enforcement officers that were carrying out routine checks on the roads, and disappeared. A crater half a meter wide and 90 cm deep was left at the site, the blast shattered windows in nearby mosques and the building of Egypt’s Ministry of Transport. The police officers were injured by shrapnel. They were taken to a hospital, where they received medical treatment.

After the army overthrew on July 3 President Mohammed Morsi, the security situation in Egypt has deteriorated. During this time, only in the north of Sinai, where extremists sharply intensified their activity after the president’s overthrow, over a hundred of law enforcement officers and military personnel were killed.

Thus, November 20 as a result of a terrorist attack on a road from Sheikh Zuvaid and Al Arish (capital of the North Sinai Governorate) 11 Egyptian servicemen were killed and another 37 were injured. A car bomb with about 150 kg of explosives was blown up when the suicide attacker that was driving it rammed into the bus column with conscripts of Egyptian armed forces that was heading for a leave to other provinces off the country.

At the same day, unidentified attackers passing by in a car threw a grenade at a police patrol car in the eastern Abud district of Cairo. As a result of this attack, a commander and three servicemen were injured.

Today, some local experts leave open the possibility that Islamists operating in Sinai are currently trying to move their attacks from the peninsula to other Egyptian provinces, and the country may come back to the terror times of the turbulent 90s.

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Middle East and North Africa

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