Update: Four soldiers injured in Delta car bombing

Four soldiers were reported injured Sunday after a car bomb went off in front of a military intelligence building in the town of Inshas, Sharqiya Governorate, north of Cairo, military spokesperson Ahmed Mohamed Ali announced on his official Facebook page.

Ali called the Delta attack “a continuation of the cowardly terrorist attacks carried out by the groups of darkness.”

The official Middle East News Agency reported on Sunday afternoon, just hours after the explosion, that Sharqiya security forces had arrested a man suspected of involvement in the attack.

Ali said that the bomb, in a addition to injuring four soldiers, damaged a fence and a building. A bomb squad carried out a search of the area and the inside of the building following the explosion, according to the online portal of state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper.

Minister of Religious Endowments Mohamed Mokhtar Goma’a said Sunday that suicide bombers are not martyrs, and must be punished for their acts. He was speaking at a conference held in at the Dar al-Iftaa Institute in Cairo.

Goma’a said that anyone who incites violence or fails to condemn it will be considered an accomplice. Goma’a continued to say that the police and military forces who are combating the current violence are taking part in a jihad, or religious war, Al-Ahram reported.

The last week of December has seen a marked escalation in terrorist attacks aimed at the police and public transport. On Tuesday, a car bomb exploded in from of a security building in Mansoura, killing 16 people.

Two days later, on Thursday, a homemade bomb exploded near a bus in Nasr City, injuring five people. A second unexploded bomb was later found nearby and defused.

Additionally, security forces detonated a grenade in Damietta on Thursday after police received reports of a suspicious device close to the Al-Azhar faculty of medicine, state-owned portal EGYNews reported, adding that exams are continuing as normal in all Al-Azhar faculties and were unaffected by the bomb threat.

On Saturday, police were called to a transit station in Heliopolis after a suspicious object was found on a parked bus. The homemade bomb was defused without injury.

The Cabinet declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization on Wednesday, and claimed that the banned group is responsible for the recent wave of terrorist attacks. No evidence of the Muslim Brotherhood's involvement, however, was offered.

Attacks on security checkpoints and police stations have intensified since the removal of Mohamed Morsi in July. It has only been in recent days that bombs have been placed at sites frequented by civilians.