CAIRO —  Egypt’s interior minister survived an assassination attempt, unscathed, on Thursday, Sept. 5, when a car bomb blew up his convoy and gunmen strafed his vehicle. He said later, a wave of terrorism by opponents of the military-installed government was just beginning.

The minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, has been involved in overseeing a violent crackdown on supporters of Mohamed Morsi, the elected Islamist president, who was overthrown two months ago by the army following mass protests against his rule.

No organization immediately claimed responsibility for the first attempt to kill an Egyptian minister since the 1990s.

Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood — accused by the government of terrorism and inciting violence — condemned it.

But the sophisticated attack, possibly involving a suicide bomber with a large quantity of explosives, as well as a follow-up fusillade by two gunmen, showed the risk that Egypt’s political crisis could spawn a wave of Islamist attacks like those in the 1980s and 1990s.

“What happened today is not the end but the beginning,” Ibrahim said.

The Interior Ministry said the blast damage indicated that a 50-kg (110-pound) bomb was used.

Footage taken by a bystander and posted on YouTube showed a vehicle ablaze as gunshots rang out for two minutes. A distant, unidentified voice could also be heard defiantly shouting the Islamic rallying cry “Allahu Akbar!”

A government video showed bullet holes all along the side of a white car, identified as Ibrahim’s, and security sources said police had killed two attackers.

A general view shows policemen investigating next to burnt cars at the site of a bomb attack and assassination attempt near the house of Egypt’s Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim in the Nasr City district of Cairo September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

A Reuters reporter saw blood and flesh scattered on the ground amid the charred wreckage of several cars.

“It is likely that it was a suicide explosion as a result of a high explosive device,” an Interior Ministry statement said.

The head of Cairo security, Osama Al-Saghir, said the ambush began seconds after Ibrahim left his house in the capital’s Nasr City, on his way to work. A car driving ahead of the convoy exploded and the minister’s armored vehicle also came under heavy gunfire, Saghir told the newspaper Al-Ahram.

Senior Brotherhood leader Amr Darrag issued a statement on behalf of the Brotherhood-led Anti-Coup Alliance, saying it strongly condemned the attack.

Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, was deposed on July 3. The new authorities have imposed a state of emergency and nightly curfews, and Morsi and most of the Brotherhood’s leaders have been arrested.

More than 900 of its supporters have been killed, many of them when security forces stormed pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo on August 14, and at least 2,000 rounded up. About 100 members of the security forces have also been killed in the political violence.

The Muslim Brotherhood says it is committed to peaceful resistance and has twice in the last week brought thousands onto the streets to denounce what it calls a coup against democracy.

Ibrahim said this week he had been told of plans to kill him and that “foreign elements” were involved. Armed forces chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi gave him an armored car, he said.

The ministry said 10 policemen had been wounded, some of them critically, as well as 11 civilians. Ibrahim said a police officer and a small child had both lost legs.

Support for crackdown

Many Egyptians have expressed support for the crackdown.

But the Brotherhood, which came to power in elections after the overthrow of general-turned-president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, says the allegations of terrorism are a pretext for neutralizing it and returning Egypt to the repression of the Mubarak era.

“This is sad,” said bystander Ahmed Mahmoud, 32. “Innocent people have died today but the government needs to know that terrorism will bring more terrorism and violence will bring more violence.

“So when they use violence to disperse protesters, despite our opinion of those Brotherhood protesters, what did they expect to get in return? Peace and prosperity? They will only get more violence.”

An Islamist insurgency in the 1990s destabilized Egypt and badly damaged the tourism industry, one of its economic mainstays, which has again been ravaged by the upheavals of the past two years.

Islamist militants, who had taken advantage of a security vacuum left by Mubarak’s fall to establish themselves in the relatively lawless North Sinai, have stepped up attacks on security forces in the area since Morsi was toppled.

Gamaa Islamiya, a group involved in 1990s attacks that has since renounced violence, denied any link to Thursday’s assault.

“These are new, small, unknown networks, independent of any organization,” said Kamal Habib, an expert on Islamist groups. “This was expected. We said it a million times.”

Nasr City was the scene of Egypt’s most famous assassination – Anwar Sadat, Mubarak’s predecessor as president, was killed by Islamist militants on October 6, 1981.  

 — Reuters. TAAN