Shooting at Mt. Sinai Egyptian monastery kills policeman

CAIRO, Egypt — A policeman was killed and four more were wounded on Tuesday in a shooting outside St Catherine’s monastery in Egypt’s south Sinai, a security source said.

The shooting occurred at a security checkpoint, the source said, but it was not immediately clear who had opened fire.

No other information on the incident was immediately available.

Khalid Abu Hashem, the health ministry official for South Sinai province, told state television that one person had been killed and four wounded.

The injured were in a stable condition and had been taken to hospital in the nearby Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, he said.

St Catherine’s monastery, which lies some 500 kilometres (300 miles) southeast of Cairo in the south of the Sinai peninsula, attracts thousands of visitors a year. It is said to be at the site of the biblical Mt. Sinai.

Just a week ago, on Palm Sunday, at least 47 Coptic Christians were killed and more than 100 injured after bombs exploded in Alexandria and Tanta in the Nile Delta. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.

Egypt is battling a jihadist insurgency in north Sinai that has killed hundreds of policemen and troops since the 2013 ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.

In October 2015, the Islamic State group said it was behind the bombing of a Russian airliner carrying holidaymakers home from the popular south Sinai resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 224 people on board.