Gunmen slay soldier in northern Sinai

Gunmen shot and killed an Egyptian soldier near the northern Sinai city of el-Arish Sunday night, a day after a Coptic priest was gunned down in the same town by suspected Islamist militants.

An Egyptian police source told AFP that the attack took place at a military checkpoint just outside town. Mina Aboud Sharween, a Coptic priest, was shot dead in el-Arish on Saturday in the latest bout of violence in the lawless Sinai Peninsula, which borders southern Israel.

Islamist gunmen have carried out a slew of attacks on northern Sinai towns since the Egyptian military staged a coup and deposed President Mohammed Morsi on Wednesday. In daylight raids Friday, gunmen killed five Egyptian soldiers in el-Arish and Rafah. In the wake of the assaults, Egypt shuttered its border with the Gaza Strip at Rafah and placed security forces in the restive Sinai Peninsula on high alert.

According to Ma’an News, the Egyptian military is planning a large-scale military operation in the Sinai Peninsula to combat the growing threat of Islamist militants. The report stated that the military build-up was coordinated with Israeli authorities, as per the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty.

Islamist terrorist groups have grown more daring since the 2011 Egyptian revolution that toppled president Hosni Mubarak, and have carried out regular attacks on UN and Egyptian forces in the Sinai Peninsula, kidnappings of tourists, and raids on the gas pipelines that pump fuel to Israel and Jordan.

Earlier on Sunday, Egyptian security officials reported that suspected Islamic militants bombed a natural gas pipeline to Jordan south of the city of el-Arish in the Sinai Peninsula.

The attacks early Sunday on two points on the pipeline started fires that were soon put out, but the flow of gas was disrupted, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

It was the first attack on Egypt’s natural gas pipelines in Sinai in over a year.

In January, suspected Islamic militants attacked a police patrol along a Sinai pipeline, wounding seven policemen.

Last year, a terror group calling itself Ansar al-Jihad claimed responsibility for more than a dozen bombings of the pipeline, with the intended goal of blocking the flow of natural gas to Israel.

The pipeline, designed to carry Egyptian natural gas to Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, has functioned intermittently since the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian revolution caused the security situation in the Sinai to deteriorate.

Due to shortages in Egypt, it currently only supplies gas to Jordan.

AP contributed to this report.