Police officer shot dead in Arish

A police officer was killed in a drive-by shooting on Wednesday morning in the North Sinai town of Arish, while security forces thwarted an attempted armed attack on a police station in the same restive region of the Sinai Peninsula.

According to privately owned Al-Shorouk newspaper, unknown assailants opened fire on the officer, who was later identified as police Sergeant Mahmoud Mohamed. The assailants then reportedly fled the scene of the crime in their car.

The shooting was reported in the residential Obour neighborhood of Arish, where many policemen and officers are said to be housed.

The incident comes just one day after the killing of 11 policemen by an explosive device planted by the roadside which targeted their vehicle in the nearby town of Sheikh Zuwayed in North Sinai.

Agence France-Presse reported on Wednesday that the killing of the 11 policemen on Tuesday was claimed by the radical jihadist group Ansar Beit al-Maqdes.

A low-scale jihadist insurgency based in North Sinai has spread to mainland Egypt since security forces ousted Islamist President Mohamed Morsi on July 3 of last year, and even more so since last August, when hundreds of Morsi supporters were killed in Cairo and Giza.

Private ONA news agency reported on Wednesday that an attack on a police station in Arish, involving Molotov cocktails, was thwarted after the assailants sped off in their getaway car.

ONA and other local news sources claim that police forces and nearby residents were able to extinguish the flames before they engulfed the whole station.