{The Islamic State (IS) group has said it carried out an attack that killed at least 13 policemen in Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula.}<\/p>\n
A mortar attack hit a checkpoint in the city of El-Arish, officials said.
\nBut the group claimed a suicide bomber blew up a car with explosives at the checkpoint, which it then raided.<\/p>\n
Jihadist militants have killed hundreds of security personnel in Sinai since the military overthrew President Mohammed Morsi in 2013.<\/p>\n
Egypt’s Interior Ministry said the attack hit the Safa checkpoint in northern Sinai.
\nWitnesses reported hearing a massive explosion and said the city had been sealed off.<\/p>\n
Government forces later killed five of the militants who carried out the attack, officials said.<\/p>\n
In a statement on Twitter, IS said the attack was “part of a series of operations in response to the humiliation and searching of Muslim women at checkpoints”.
\nThe group has claimed numerous deadly attacks in the region recently, targeting mainly security forces.<\/p>\n
It has also said it was responsible for the bombing of a Russian airliner over Sinai in October that killed all 224 people on board.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{The Islamic State (IS) group has said it carried out an attack that killed at least 13 policemen in Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula.} A mortar attack hit a checkpoint in the city of El-Arish, officials said. But the group claimed a suicide bomber blew up a car with explosives at the checkpoint, which it then […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[100],"byline":[249],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-24044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-africa","byline-bbc"],"bylines":[{"id":249,"name":"BBC","slug":"bbc","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":104}],"contributors":[{"id":249,"name":"BBC","slug":"bbc","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":104}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24044\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24044"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=24044"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=24044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}