Cairo/Al Arish: Twin blasts on Wednesday targeting Egypt’s army killed at least five soldiers in the restive Sinai peninsula, where the military is battling Islamist militants, security officials said.
“A large explosion” targeted the military intelligence headquarters in Rafah on the border with the Gaza Strip, one official said.
Minutes later, a second explosion hit an army checkpoint nearby.
Four soldiers were killed and 13 injured in the first attack, while one soldier died and six were hurt at the checkpoint, officials said.
Witnesses said they heard explosions and saw clashes between militants and military forces. The first blast, said witnesses, shattered the windows of buildings in Rafah’s Imam Ali area.
The military intelligence headquarters is located in a high-security military zone and surrounded by checkpoints, sources in Rafah said.
The Rafah border crossing - the only gateway into the Palestinian enclave that bypasses Israel - was shut and all roads in and out of the town were closed as armed forces combed the area for suspects.
A suicide bomber drove at high speed into the one-story building in the town of Rafah, collapsing the building’s front part and burying an unspecified number of troops under the rubble, two security officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.
Simultaneously, militants fired rocket propelled grenades at an army checkpoint not far from the military intelligence building, the officials added.
Militants in Sinai, some with links to Al Qaida, have been targeting for months Egyptian forces in the strategic peninsula bordering Gaza and Israel. Their attacks have become much more frequent, and deadlier, since the ouster in July of Egypt’s Islamist president Mohammad Mursi.
The Egyptian military earlier this week launched a major offensive against the militants in the northern region of Sinai.
Officials have described the offensive, which started on Saturday, as the biggest sweep of the region in recent years, aiming to weed out Al Qaida-inspired groups that have taken control of villages in northern Sinai.
The Sinai-based Islamist militant group Ansar Bayt Al Maqdis had claimed responsibility for an attempt last week to kill the Egyptian interior minister in Cairo and promised more attacks in revenge for a crackdown on Egypt’s Islamists.
