Purported statement from Egypt’s Islamic State affiliate claims Cairo bombing

A powerful auto bomb exploded early Thursday near a national security building in a popular residential neighborhood in Cairo, wounding 29 people including at least six police officers.

The driver of the vehicle parked it in front of the National Security Building in the northern suburb of Shubra al-Kheema and then was picked up by a motorcycle and fled, the ministry said.

A vehicle laden with explosives detonated outside the premises in the capital’s northern Shubra al-Khaima neighborhood early on Thursday morning, shattering windows, destroying a wall, and leaving a large crater.

The group also claimed responsibility for an auto bombing on the Italian consulate in central Cairo last month that killed one and wounded 10, representing the first evidence of the IS affiliates in Egypt going after Western targets.

It stepped up its insurgency in revenge for a police crackdown on Islamists following the military’s 2013 ouster of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.

The Isis message said the attack was in retribution for the “martyrs of Arab Sharkas” a reference to a group of six men who were hanged in May after being convicted in a military trial denounced by human rights groups as flawed. Wrecked cars stood around the building, as security forces carrying assault rifles patrolled the streets and set up roadblocks to ward off hysterical residents. Morsi himself has been sentenced to death.

Maj. Gen. Abu Bakr Abdel-Kareem, the Egyptian Deputy Interior Minister for Media Affairs, attributed the recent rise in attacks on the government to “the preemptive strikes and successive successes by security forces against the terrorist elements”.

The militant group has regularly attacked security forces since the army ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013. To address the problem, the state legislature has passed several anti-terrorism laws in the past few months.

The new law also includes punishments for journalists who go against the official version of an attack, threatening them with fines of between $25,000 and $64,000.

The attack reflected a strategy of the group’s branch in Egypt, which has targeted authorities, but avoided spectacularly bloody civilian casualties – at least for now.

The cupboard permitted the draft anti-terrorism regulation final month, two days after an automotive bomb in an upscale Cairo neighbourhood killed the nation’s prosecutor-general, Hisham Barakat.