CAIRO (Reuters) – Three Egyptian policemen were killed while preventing four Islamist militants on death row fleeing a Cairo prison on Wednesday, the interior ministry said.
All four militants were killed in the failed attempt to escape from Tora prison, it added in a statement.
Three of the prisoners named in the statement were convicted in 2018 with establishing and joining a militant group called Ansar al-Sharia and killing at least 10 policemen in a series of attacks between August 2013 and May 2014.
The fourth was convicted in 2018 of killing a Christian doctor, local newspapers said.
The interior ministry statement did not give further details.
Ansar al-Sharia announced its formation in Egypt in July 2013, saying the army’s ousting of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in the same month was a declaration of war on its faith and threatening to use violence to impose Islamic law.
(Reporting by Haitham Ahmed and Mahmoud Mourad; Editing by Alex Richardson)
