REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, CAIRO - A bomb blast tore through a police compound in Egypt's Nile Delta on Tuesday, killing 12 people and wounding 134 in one of the deadliest attacks since the army deposed President Mohamed Mursi in July. The Brotherhood condemned the blast, saying it was "an attack on the unity of the Egyptian people".
State television showed the security building with shattered windows and one wall partially collapsed, and a bulldozer removing rubble in the street in front of it. A security source said the blast may have been caused by a car bomb. Witnesses in Mansoura said many cars inside and outside the security compound were burned out and the entire city was in chaos as people hurried to hospitals to check on victims. Egypt's Nile News TV cut into its late-night programming to urge people to go to hospitals to donate blood to the victims.
With eight policemen among the dead, the blast pointed to the risk of militancy moving to the densely populated Nile Valley from the Sinai Peninsula, where attacks have killed some 200 members of the security forces since Mursi's downfall.
"We face an enemy that has no religion or nation," Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim, the survivor of an assassination attempt in September, said while inspecting the scene of the blast, an Interior Ministry statement said.
The military-backed presidency declared it a terrorist attack. They said that the blast an hour after midnight in the city of Mansoura north of Cairo would not derail a political transition plan whose next step is a January referendum on a new constitution.
"These type of operations only increase the state's determination to uproot terrorism across the country," it said in a statement published by state-run media.
Egypt has suffered the deadliest internal strife in its modern history since the army deposed Mursi, the nation's first freely elected leader, on July 3 after big protests against him. The security forces killed hundreds of his supporters as part of a campaign to repress his Muslim Brotherhood, while lethal attacks on the security forces have become commonplace.
Tuesday's bombing prompted a cabinet statement declaring Mursi's Muslim Brotherhood a "terrorist organization", though the bulletin carried by the state news agency did not explicitly accuse the group of staging the attack. Ibrahim said the police were investigating exactly how it had been staged.
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