A Sinai-based Islamist militant faction Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis has claimed it was behind a car bomb attack on an Egyptian police compound in the Nile Delta which killed 16 people and wounded about 140.
The army-backed government vowed to fight “black terrorism” after Tuesday’s bombing in the city of Mansoura, saying it would not upset a political transition plan whose next step is a January referendum on a new constitution.
Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, or Supporters of Jerusalem, said Egypt’s rulers were fighting Islamic authority and had spilled the blood of oppressed Muslims. The police compound was a “nest of apostasy and tyranny”, it said.
“We are continuing, God allowing, to fight them,” the group said in a statement posted on an Islamist website.
The bombing increased fears that militant attacks, which have become commonplace in the Sinai peninsula since the army ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in July following mass protests against him, are spilling into the rest of Egypt.
Attacks intensified after security forces killed hundreds of Morsi supporters and smashed their protest camps in Cairo in August.
Morsi belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood, which denies any links to violence or to Sinai-based militant groups.
Sinai-based group claims Egypt police compound bombing
