Deadly attacks hit Egypt’s North Sinai

A suicide car bomb targeting a police station in Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula has killed six people and wounded 44 others, police and medics say.

Sunday’s bombing came hours after a roadside blast targeted an army vehicle killing six soldiers and wounding two in the peninsula, where security forces are battling an insurgency.

One of the two killed in the suicide car bombing was a civilian, and several policemen were among those wounded, medics said.

Police said the attacker drove a truck loaded with explosives but covered with straw and detonated it close to the police station in North Sinai’s provincial capital of El-Arish.

The facade of the police station was damaged, police said, adding that several nearby buildings also suffered damages.

Earlier, an explosion targeting a military vehicle killed five Egyptian soldiers near the town of Sheikh Zuweid in North Sinai, Reuters news agency reported, quoting a security official.

Security officials said the roadside bomb was planted in an area of the northern Sinai peninsula that is a stronghold of Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, which has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.

Egypt has conducted a long-running campaign in the Sinai Peninsula.

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis say their attacks targeting security forces are in retaliation for a government crackdown on former President Mohamed Morsi’s supporters that left hundreds dead.

Al Jazeera’s Cairo bureau chief, Abdelfattah Fayed, said there was a “military and media war” going on in Sinai between the army and the groups behind the attacks, adding that the government is only beginning to speak puplicly about the attacks after assailants posted videos about them.

Early in April, a series of ambushes targeting the military killed 15 soldiers and two civilians.

The army said 15 of the attackers were also killed in the clashes.

In January this year, suicide car bombers and attackers killed several dozen soldiers at a military base in El Arish.