Bomb wounds woman near Egypt presidential palace

CAIRO, Egypt — A bomb blast just 100 meters from a Cairo presidential palace wounded a female passerby early Thursday, just hours after a train bomb killed three people, security officials said.

The new bombing followed an attack on a train north of the Egyptian capital late on Wednesday which killed two policemen and a civilian, the latest in a spate of attacks since the army ousted Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in July last year.

The blast struck near a palace in the northeast of Cairo which is rarely used by President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the architect of Morsi’s overthrow, whose main office is in another palace in the capital.

The bystander suffered only minor injuries from the crude bomb, which was planted under a bridge, interior ministry spokesman Hani Abdel Latif told AFP.

Wednesday evening’s train bomb in Menufiya province was also rudimentary but it detonated as police were inspecting it, killing two officers and one passenger.

Authorities have for years battled Islamic militants in the Sinai Peninsula, but the unrest there has escalated into a full-fledged insurgency since Morsi’s ouster in July last year. The attacks, mainly targeting security forces, have spread to the Nile Delta and Cairo itself.

The attacks in Cairo have mainly involved small, homemade bombs that cause few casualties. But they have still revealed meticulous planning and execution by the militants and exposed the inefficiency of the police.

One such attack involved three homemade bombs that went off less than 20 meters (yards) away from the walls of Cairo’s presidential Ittihadiya palace, where Sissi conducts business on daily basis. Two senior police officers were killed, one of whom was trying to defuse a bomb while in civilian clothes and without wearing protective gear.

In the deadliest ever militant attack on the military, at least 30 soldiers were killed late last month in Sinai, prompting Sissi to declare a state of emergency in northern Sinai and order the eviction of some 10,000 people from the town of Rafah on the border with the Gaza Strip.

Sissi’s government has taken drastic measures to restore law and order and jumpstart the economy after three years of turmoil following the uprising that ended Hosni Mubarak’s nearly three-decade rule in 2011.

But a recent series of deadly road accidents has underscored the persistently poor state of government services and infrastructure.

On Wednesday, at least 18 people, mostly school children, were killed in a horrific road accident north of Cairo. News of the accident dominated the front page of every Cairo newspaper on Thursday. The accident prompted Sissi to order an overhaul of traffic regulations to stiffen penalties against offenders.

Last week, the burning death of a newborn baby in a private clinic caused a similar uproar. The baby was placed on a heating device soon after its birth, but a technical fault caused the machine to overheat. Graphic images of the baby’s blackened body were published in newspapers, reviving longstanding complaints about a culture of negligence and mismanagement.