CAIRO: Military airstrikes killed 27 militants in Egypt’s Northern Sinai on Friday in one of the biggest security operations in the region in months, security sources said.
Apache helicopters targeted militants from the Sinai Province group, which pledges allegiance to Islamic State, the sources said.
Sinai Province, fighting to topple the Cairo government, has claimed responsibility for coordinated attacks that killed more than 30 members of the security forces in late January.
After that bloodshed, President Abdel Fattah El-Sissi told Egyptians the country faced a long, tough battle against militants.
On Friday, Brotherhood supporters and security forces clashed in the Cairo suburb of Matariya, the state news agency reported.
Separately, an Egyptian lawyer who admits spreading terrorist threats after the 1998 bombings of two US embassies should be sentenced to the maximum 25 years in prison under a plea deal he reached last year, government lawyers say, while his lawyers have urged a judge to take into account his repudiation of violence.
Adel Abdul Bary is set to be sentenced in Manhattan federal court, where he entered a surprise plea to conspiracy charges in September. Prior to his plea, a conviction at trial could have resulted in a life prison term for his role in a conspiracy that resulted in the August 1998 bombings in Tanzania and Kenya.
