One dead in Cairo bombings

CAIRO — One person was killed Thursday in a bombing outside a pizzeria in the Egyptian capital as other blasts hit a police station and offices of cell phone companies, a health official said.

The bomb tore off the legs of the victim who was pronounced dead in hospital, health ministry spokesman Hossam Abdel Ghaffar told AFP. Two other people were wounded.

The restaurant was next to a branch of the Britain-based cell phone provider Vodafone.

Two other bombs targeted its offices in another neighbourhood and a third bomb went off outside a branch of United Arab Emirates-owned Etisalat, damaging the store fronts but causing no casualties, interior ministry spokesman Hany Abdel Latif told AFP.

The offices were closed at the time of the explosions.

Hours later, an explosion outside a police station in the north of the capital wounded a police conscript and three passersby, police officials said.

It was not immediately clear why the cell phone companies were targeted, but Abdel Latif said authorities had been on the alert for attacks in the run-up to parliamentary elections next month.

Militants have set off dozens of bombs in the capital since the army overthrew Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013 and cracked down on his supporters, killing hundreds of protesters in street clashes.

Most of the bombs have been rudimentary and caused no casualties.

But several have killed policemen, including two senior officers killed while attempting to defuse bombs planted outside the presidential palace in June last year.

Those bombs, and several others that killed policemen in Cairo, were claimed by the Ajnad Misr militant group.

In the Sinai Peninsula where they are based, militants who have pledged allegiance to Daesh terror group have killed scores of soldiers and policemen since Morsi's overthrow.

Daesh affiliate in Sinai set up branches in the Nile Delta, targeting police headquarters in Cairo and other cities before police killed and arrested most of their operatives last year.

Jihadists, who have focused their attacks on security forces, were also believed to be planning attacks on the embassies of countries that have backed the former army chief and now President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, officials have said.

Sisi was elected to office in May 2014 pledging to eradicate the militants, but has had limited success, especially in the Sinai where they are waging an insurgency.