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Egypt Hit by Three Brazen Attacks in New Mayhem Egypt Hit by Three Brazen Attacks in New Mayhem
(about 1 hour later)
CAIRO — Foes of Egypt’s military-appointed government carried out three brazen attacks on Monday, killing six soldiers in a drive-by shooting near the Suez Canal, bombing a security building in the tourist-dependent southern Sinai that left at least three police officers dead, and firing grenades at a Cairo compound housing the country’s main satellite transmitter. CAIRO — Deadly violence against the government broke out around Egypt on Monday as health officials raised to 53 the number said to have been killed the day before in clashes between supporters and opponents of the military takeover that ousted President Mohamed Morsi three months ago.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the attacks, and no indication that they were coordinated in any way. But they came a day after the worst street clashes to convulse Egypt since mid-August, raising new questions about the interim government’s success in stabilizing the country. At least 51 people were killed in the street clashes, and hundreds were injured, as the Muslim Brotherhood constituency of the ousted president, Mohamed Morsi, continued to mount protests and be met with a violent crackdown by the military. Unidentified gunmen in the Suez Canal city if Ismailia killed six soldiers including a lieutenant in a drive-by shooting, while a car bomb at the security headquarters in the southern Sinai town of Al-Tor killed two police officers and injured nearly 50 other people, state media reported. In Cairo, assailants fired at least one rocket propelled grenade through a satellite dish used to transmit Egyptian state television.
Ahram Online, the Web site of the Egypt’s main newspaper, said the six soldiers who were killed Monday near the canal were on patrol in a pickup truck outside the city of Ismailia when they were attacked by masked gunmen in another vehicle. Everyone in the trick was killed, the newspaper said. The grenade attack was reported to have only caused minor damage, but it was the first time since the before the revolt against President Hosni Mubarak nearly three years ago that anyone had used such a heavy weapon in the vicinity of the capital.
The bombing of the security building took place in the town of el-Tor in the southern Sinai, the region where Egypt’s famed Sharm el-Sheik resort is located. The location of the attack was a departure; most of the near-daily attacks by radical Islamists in Sinai have been against security forces in the north. It took place in Maadi, an affluent enclave up the Nile from downtown that is the home to many embassies and diplomats and considered among the most secure precincts of the city.
The attack on the satellite transmitter in the Maadi district caused no casualties and only minor damage, but it appeared to represent a new level of audacity by opponents of the interim government. Sky News Arabia, a pan-Arab news channel, said that armed assailants attacked the facility with rocket-propelled grenades. Coming in the aftermath of the previous day’s clashes, the attacks were among the strongest indications yet that the new government appointed on July 3 by General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi had not yet secured full control of the streets.
The new government has sought to crush the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist supporters President Morsi with a level of violence without precedent in modern Egyptian history. It has killed more than 1,000 protesters in mass shootings in the streets, imprisoned almost all of the Brotherhood’s leaders, and silenced much of allied news media.
The Sunday protests against the military takeover took place on a national holiday celebrating the military, when the new government called its civilian supporters into the streets to push back the Islamists and threatened them with heavy retribution from security forces as well.
But the heavy turnout of pro-Morsi demonstrators, even at a time when the Muslim Brotherhood has been effectively decapitated, demonstrated the organization’s resilience in the face of the crackdown.
The attacks on Monday morning were the latest indication that some opponents of the government are also resorting to random or isolated acts of violence, suggesting Egypt could face a prolonged period of turmoil.
The location of the El-Tor bombing on Monday raised the possibility that radical Islamists who have been carrying out frequent attacks against targets in the northern Sinai had now expanded their range into the southern Sinai, home to Egypt’s famed Sharm el-Sheik resort, a major tourist attraction.
The military-backed government that replaced Mr. Morsi has tried to project an aura of stability in Egypt, hoping to lure back the tourists and investors who were scared off by several years of turmoil in the country.The military-backed government that replaced Mr. Morsi has tried to project an aura of stability in Egypt, hoping to lure back the tourists and investors who were scared off by several years of turmoil in the country.
But on Sunday, only grim, familiar scenes of violence returned, along with the sounds of gunfire. In a new sign of the military-appointed government’s increased embrace of Saudi Arabia, which supported the decision to depose Mr. Morsi, the interim president, Adly Mansour, made his first foreign trip abroad on Monday to Riyadh, the Saudi capital
The street clashes came as thousands of Egyptians celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1973 war with Israel, setting up a day of bizarre contrasts that served as reminders of Egypt’s deepening polarization. Saudi Arabia’s ruling monarchy, long opposed to the Arab Spring revolutionary movements that led to Mr. Morsi’s election last year, has provided the interim government that replaced him with billions of dollars worth of emergency grants and loans.
As the military’s supporters celebrated the anniversary in Tahrir Square in Cairo with music and fireworks, officers and armed civilian loyalists set upon Islamist protesters who were also trying to reach the square, driving back their marches with tear gas and gunfire.

Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.

More than 250 people were injured, officials said.
Over the last three months, with little resistance from the public, the military has set out to vanquish the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that propelled Mr. Morsi to power. Since July, hundreds of Brotherhood members have been killed and most of the movement’s leaders have been sent to jail or fled the country.
And Mr. Morsi’s Islamist supporters, who have re-branded themselves under the banner of the “anti-coup” movement, have continued to protest despite the repression of their marches and sit-ins, and dwindling attendance at their demonstrations.
They had billed the protests on Sunday as their own tribute to the armed services, while promising a new level of confrontation: for the first time since Mr. Morsi’s ouster, they called for marches on Tahrir Square, a stronghold of the anti-Morsi movement.
The decision to call for demonstrations on Oct. 6, the anniversary of the 1973 war, also seemed part of a persistent, but so far fruitless, effort by the Islamists to identify cracks in the military, Egypt’s most powerful institution.
In a statement last week, the anti-coup protesters said they intended to salute “the soldiers who fought the October war — so our brave army regains its commitment to the true Egyptian military doctrine and knows the difference between the enemy and its people, before it turns into militias that do not have any other mission but killing its own people.”
The military-backed government responded by calling for its own commemoration of the war in Tahrir Square, setting up the likelihood of a bloody confrontation between civilians. On Saturday, a spokesman for the interim president said that protesters against the military were “agents, not activists.”

David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Rick Gladstone from New York.