In one of the worst attacks since the army ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, a powerful car bomb tore through an Egyptian police headquarters on Tuesday, killing at least 13 people. Medics, who had earlier put the toll at 14 dead, reported that 12 of the dead were policemen. Egyptian authorities said the aim was to derail the country’s transition to democracy. Prime Minister Hazem El Beblawi called this the “most heinous kind of terrorism, which left at least 100 people wounded in the city of Mansoura northeast of Cairo as reported by Bloomberg News.
The car bomb blew up outside a security headquarters in Egypt’s Nile Delta. The car was packed with dozens of kilograms of TNT. The car was then parked near the security headquarters. The explosion hit the multi-story police headquarters shortly after 1:00 am. The explosions blast peeled off part of the building’s façade. This is the second time the building has been targeted this year, after a pipe bomb outside the headquarters killed a policeman in July.
Ziad Akl, a senior researcher at the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo, suggests that such attacks may “very soon also travel to Upper Egypt down the Nile valley.”
“This is an attempt to terrorize people because of the referendum. There is security plan, and this will not affect the referendum,” Minister Mohamed Ibrahim told reporters. He says that the explosion was meant to intimidate voters ahead of a constitutional referendum next month, billed as the first step in the democratic transition after Morsi’s overthrow. Bloomberg News has reported that Egypt’s political turmoil has weighed heavily on their economy.
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