Agencies
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Gunmen killed an Egyptian intelligence officer and a policeman on a road outside Cairo in a late-night firefight, the interior ministry said yesterday.
The armed men fled the scene after shooting dead Captain Ashraf Badeer el-Qazaz of the intelligence service and a police conscript, the ministry said in a statement.
The two men, who were on security patrol late on Saturday on a desert road linking Cairo to the canal city of Suez, were gunned down when they tried to stop a vehicle.
Islamist militants have stepped up attacks on members of the security forces and killed hundreds of them since the army toppled Egypt’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Mursi, last July.
The insurgency poses a threat to national security ahead of a presidential election in May and also hurts the country’s tourist industry, a key source of foreign income in Egypt.
Militants have recently shown their ability to strike beyond the Sinai Peninsula, the initial base of their attacks after Mursi was removed from power. The group Ajnad Misr claimed responsibility on Saturday for a blast in Cairo that killed one police officer on Friday.
An Egyptian court sentenced 23 people it said were members of Mursi’s banned Muslim Brotherhood movement to 3-1/2 years each in prison on Saturday, judicial sources said.
The accused were jailed in connection with protests in November against the trial of Mursi. They were found guilty of charges including attacking security forces and “thuggery”, among other charges.
The first sentence handed to a leader of the Brotherhood since it was outlawed last year came on Saturday, when Mohamed El-Beltagy was jailed for one year for insulting the judiciary.
Mursi himself is still standing trial in a number of cases, charged with crimes including conspiring with foreign militant groups against Egypt, which carries the death penalty.
The Brotherhood was Egypt’s best organised political party until last year but the government has accused it of turning to violence since Mursi was overthrown. The movement says it is committed to peacefully resisting what it views as a military coup.
The presidential election next month is set to be a contest between ex-army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and leftist Hamdeen Sabbahi, after nobody else entered the race by yesterday’s cut-off.
The lack of other candidates means the poll will be held over one round on May 26 and 27, with Sisi expected to easily win after he led the ouster of Mursi.
Sisi’s campaign submitted almost 200,000 signatures backing his candidacy, well over the 25,000 required endorsements.
Sisi’s support dwarfed Sabbahi’s, who gathered around 30,000 signatures. They were the only two candidates to submit the endorsements before yesterday’s deadline.
“Every candidate can now appeal against the other. We have two who requested candidacy,” electoral committee official Abdel al-Aziz Salman told a news conference.
The final list of candidates will be confirmed on May 2.
Sisi, who resigned from the army last month to contest the election, is riding a wave of popularity for ending the divisive presidency of Mursi after days of mass protests.
But Mursi’s supporters accuse Sisi of leading a coup against the country’s first elected and civilian president after only a year in office.
Sabbahi, who had supported Mursi’s overthrow, had placed third in the 2012 election that Mursi won.
He has since styled himself as a “revolutionary” opposed to the powerful military’s role in politics.
