Egypt’s interior minister narrowly survived an assassination attempt Thursday when a car bomb tore through his convoy in a Cairo neighborhood, in the first attack on a senior government official since the country’s Islamist president was toppled in a coup two months ago.
The blast targeting Mohammed Ibrahim, who is in charge of Egypt’s aggressive police force, left several charred cars and broken building facades in its wake. The attempt on Ibrahim escalates the confrontation between the country’s new leadership and Islamists, fueling concerns over a possible wave of violence in retaliation for the July 3 ouster of Mohammed Morsi and the ensuing crackdown on Islamists.
At least 22 people were wounded, including police and civilian bystanders, and some vehicles in Ibrahim’s convoy were heavily damaged— though he was not hurt. Security officials said initial investigations showed it came from a parked car loaded with explosives in the trunk.
The attack echoed the sort of insurgency-style methods that Islamic militants have increasingly used in Egypt’s tumultuous Sinai Peninsula. Last month, militants there attempted a suicide car bombing but were killed by police before carrying it out.
The bombing also hearkened back to the insurgency waged by Islamic militants in the 1980s and 1990s against the rule of now-ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
At that time, militants targeted several senior officials, killing the parliament speaker and attempting to assassinate at least four successive interior ministers, the last in 1993. Mubarak himself survived an assassination attempt in 1994, when militants attacked his convoy in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Some of Morsi’s more hard-line supporters have publicly threatened to wage a campaign of assassinations and car bombings against officials of the military-backed government until the former president is reinstated.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast. Police searched the area for suspects but no arrests were made, security officials said.
The explosion detonated in the late morning as Ibrahim’s convoy passed through Nasr City, an eastern district of Cairo that is a stronghold of the Brotherhood. Among those wounded were 10 police and 11 civilians, including a 7-year-old child whose right leg was amputated, the security officials said.
A mangled body was found near the car believed to have been used as the bomb and investigators were working to determine if it was of a bystander, a bomber or perhaps a lookout tasked with alerting the convoy’s approach, the officials said.
The blast left a main avenue in Nasr City strewn with charred vehicles, and a fire in one poured out heavy black smoke. Nearby storefronts were mangled and windows of nearby apartment buildings were shattered.
Clearly shaken, Ibrahim said on state television that his black SUV was directly hit by a “large-size explosive device” that badly damaged it along with four other vehicles in the convoy.
“It was a heinous (assassination) attempt,” he later told reporters at the Interior Ministry in central Cairo. “Even if I am martyred, another minister of interior will come and continue the war on the evil terror until we secure the country,” Ibrahim said.
Ibrahim has aggressively led the crackdown on Islamists. More than 900 of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood supporters have been killed, many of them when police stormed a sit-in protest by Morsi supporters on Aug. 14, not far from the bomb site in another part of Nasr City. Hundreds more of them have been arrested since the coup, including the Brotherhood’s top leader Mohammed Badie and his powerful deputy Khairat el-Shater. Morsi has been held in an undisclosed location. About 100 members of the security forces have also been killed in the violence.
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