Egypt’s Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim on Thursday survived a bomb attack on his convoy, warning shortly afterwards the country faced a “wave of terrorism” amid a sweeping police crackdown.
Security officials said a car bomb struck the minister’s convoy around 10:30am near his home in the NasrCity area, in the first such attack in Cairo in years.
An Interior Ministry statement said Ibrahim’s convoy was targeted by a “bomb”, without providing further details.
An official in the Health Ministry said seven people were wounded in the blast, while an Interior Ministry official said four policemen were injured, including a policeman who lost his leg in the explosion.
Ibrahim emerged on state television several hours after the attack to condemn the “cowardly assassination attempt”, saying his convoy was targeted by a bomb that wounded “many guards”.
He told reporters that he had warned of such violence after the launch on August 14 of a crackdown on protesters who had set up camps in Cairo to protest the army’s removal from power of president Mohamed Morsi.
“I had warned before the dispersals of sit-ins in Rabaa and Nahda that there will be a wave of terrorism. This was expected,” Ibrahim said.
Hundreds of people were killed in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya and Nahda squares when police stormed the protest camps.
