Egypt's top prosecutor dies after convoy struck by car bomb

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Egypt's top prosecutor dies after convoy struck by car bomb

Senior official fatally injured after convoy was hit by suspected Islamist militants

PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 30 June, 2015, 12:23pm
UPDATED : Tuesday, 30 June, 2015, 12:23pm

Reuters in Cairo

Police inspect the site of the attack on the convoy.Photo: AFP

Egypt's top public prosecutor died yesterday of wounds sustained in a car bomb attack on his convoy as it was leaving his Cairo home yesterday in a marked escalation of Islamist militant attacks on the judiciary.

Judges and other state officials have increasingly been targeted by radical Islamists opposed to President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi and angered by hefty prison sentences imposed on members of the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

Yesterday's attack claimed the most senior state official since Sisi, a former army chief, ousted Islamist president Mohammed Mursi in 2013 after mass protests against his rule. Mursi was sentenced this month to death over a mass jailbreak in 2011.

State media, medical and judicial sources confirmed the death of chief prosecutor Hisham Barakat at a hospital in the residential district of Heliopolis where he had undergone surgery hours earlier.

There was no confirmed claim of responsibility for the attack, in which security sources said a bomb in a parked car was remotely detonated as Barakat's motorcade passed by. They initially said a car bomber had rammed into the convoy.

The state news agency MENA said the bomb blast also wounded at least nine other people including police and civilians.

Last month, the Islamic State group's Egypt affiliate urged followers to attack judges, opening a new front in an Islamist insurgency in the world's most populous Arab country. Earlier in May, three judges were shot dead in the Sinai city of al-Arish.

Eyewitnesses said the latest bombing was strong enough to shatter glass in nearby storefronts and homes.

Barakat's place of work was also targeted earlier this year when a bomb exploded near the High Court in central Cairo, killing two people.

Egypt is facing a Sinai-based insurgency that has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers since Mursi's fall. The most active group is Sinai Province, which has pledged allegiance to Islamic State, the ultra-hardline jihadist group that has seized control of significant areas of Iraq and Syria.

A video titled "Eliminating the Judges" was published by the group's media arm on Sunday, showing gunmen firing on a vehicle they said was transporting judges.