Egypt’s top public prosecutor was killed by a car bomb attack on his convoy on Monday, the most senior State official to die at the hands of militants since the toppling of Islamist President Mohamed Morsy two years ago.
There was no confirmed claim of responsibility. Security sources said a bomb in a parked car was remotely detonated as Hisham Barakat’s motorcade left his home, after saying earlier a car bomber had rammed into the convoy.
Targeting Islamists 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’s Egyptian affiliate urged followers to attack judges, opening a new front in an Islamist insurgency in Egypt.
Morsy, 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. 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 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.
The Brotherhood has denied any link to violence and said it was committed to peaceful activism. Its spokesman said on the group's Facebook page it rejected the killing, but that responsibility for the attack on the public prosecutor lay with the authorities.
