Takfiri terrorist group of Daesh claims responsibility for killing of Egyptian general in Sinai

A file photo of Daesh terrorists

The Takfiri terrorist group of Daesh, which is mainly active in Iraq and Syria, has claimed responsibility for the killing of an Egyptian general in Egypt’s restive North Sinai Province.

The group claimed that its gunmen had killed Hesham Mahmoud Abualazm, 47, in a drive-by shooting in the northeastern Egyptian province’s capital of El Arish, reports said on Friday.

Two weeks ago, unidentified militants gunned down Brigadier General Adel Ragaei, who used to command an armored division deployed to Sinai.

Militants have slain hundreds of soldiers and police officers in the sparsely-populated Sinai Peninsula over the past several years.

Daesh has been active in the region through its so-called Velayat Sinai offshoot, which, back in July, killed a high-ranking Egyptian police officer, named as Colonel Hassan Ahmad Rashad.

Such attacks have increased since the 2013 ouster by the military of Egypt’s first democratically-elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

Egypt’s military launched a high-scale security operation against the militants’ positions in Sinai in September 2015, following coordinated terrorist attacks on several army checkpoints that claimed the lives of 21 soldiers in July that year.

Also on Friday, Ahmed Aboul Fotouh, an Egyptian judge who was involved in the trial of Morsi, survived an assassination attempt in the eastern Cairo neighborhood of Nasr City.

The Hasam Movement, a newly-emerged militant group, claimed responsibility for the bombing that targeted but failed to kill Fatouh.

The movement has so far also claimed a failed attempt to assassinate a senior Egyptian cleric.

In a separate development, Egyptian authorities said they had arrested members of the Hasam Movement and another group, Louwaa al-Thawra, with weapons and explosives.

The Interior Ministry said on Friday that five leaders and other members of the two groups had been detained.

Egyptian authorities also said both groups were linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, with which Morsi has been affiliated.

Since Morsi’s ouster in a military coup in 2013, the Egyptian government now ruled by the military general who orchestrated the coup has been cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood and Morsi’s supporters.

The former Egyptian president has been sentenced to death by the new government.