Cairo: A bomb blast near Egypt’s supreme court in downtown Cairo on Monday killed one person and wounded seven others, including three policemen, police and state media said.

The official MENA news agency, citing the interior ministry, said the person killed in the crowded district of central Cairo was a civilian.

It was not immediately clear whether a police checkpoint near the court and a metro station had been the target.

The latest attack came a day after two civilians died in a bombing outside a police station in southern Egypt.

A worker in a nearby cafe said he ran out to the street after hearing a loud explosion.

“I found three people lying on the ground covered in blood.”

Police sealed off the area and swept it with bomb detector dogs as ambulances tried to reach the site through a crowd of onlookers.

Militants have regularly set off bombs in the capital, mostly targeting police, after the 2013 military overthrow of Islamist president Mohammad Mursi unleashed a deadly crackdown on his supporters.

It was the second time a bomb has gone off near the supreme court, after an explosion wounded 12 people last October.

Monday’s explosion came days after a series of bombings in Cairo killed one person.

Five bombs struck within hours, four of them near mobile phone service companies and a police station.

Most of the bombings in the capital have been rudimentary and caused no casualties.

But several have killed policemen, including two senior officers who died while trying to defuse bombs planted outside the presidential palace last June.

Those bombs and several others that killed policemen in Cairo were claimed by the Ajnad Misr militant group.

Sinai Peninsula-based militants who have pledged allegiance to the Daesh group have killed scores of soldiers and policemen since Mursi’s overthrow.

The Daesh affiliate in Sinai set up branches in the Nile Delta, targeting police headquarters in Cairo and other cities before police killed and arrested most of their operatives last year.

Militants, who have focused their attacks on security forces, are also believed to be planning attacks on embassies of countries that have backed the former army chief and now President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi, according to officials.

Al Sissi was elected to office in May 2014 pledging to eradicate the militants, but he has had limited success, especially against the Sinai insurgency.

On January 29, simultaneous car bombings and mortar attacks on security headquarters in the peninsula killed at least 30 people, most of them soldiers.