Egypt’s top public prosecutor died of wounds sustained in a car bomb attack on his convoy as it was leaving his home on Monday, the most senior state official killed in militant violence since the toppling of an Islamist president two years ago.
Judges and other senior officials have increasingly been targeted by radical Islamists opposed to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and angered by hefty prison sentences imposed on members of the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.
Last month, the Islamic State militant group’s Egypt affiliate urged followers to attack judges, opening a new front in an Islamist insurgency in Egypt..
Chief prosecutor Hisham Barakat was the highest-ranking state official to die in a militant attack since Sisi, a former army chief, ousted Islamist president Mohamed Mursi in mid-2013 after mass protests against his rule.
Mursi, a Brotherhood leader who was freely elected as Egypt’s president in 2012, was sentenced this month to death over a mass jailbreak in 2011. The Brotherhood has denied any link to recent militant bloodshed, reiterating what it calls a long commitment to non-violence.
Monday’s attack stirred fears of yet more turmoil in Egypt, which has been struggling since the 2011 popular uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak to regain full-fledged stability and revive the economy of the Arab world’s most populous country.
The bombing, which left cars ablaze and store fronts damaged, also showed the risk of militant Islam threatening the Egyptian state leadership as it did in the 1980s and 1990s.
State media confirmed the death of Barakat, 64, at a hospital in the residential district of Heliopolis where he had undergone surgery hours earlier, and said he would receive a military funeral.
