At least 235 people have been killed following an attack on a Sufi mosque in Egypt’s Sinai region.
Islamist militants reportedly set off a bomb before opening fire on people attending Friday afternoon prayers at the Al Rawdah mosque in Bir al-Abed, some 40 kilometres from the North Sinai provincial capital of el-Arish. The gunman were reported to have taken to vehicles and fired on worshippers as they fled as well as arriving ambulances.
Authorities in Egypt put the death toll at 235 with more than 100 others wounded. No-one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, named as the deadliest in Egypt’s modern history with the death toll surpassing the number killed when a Russian passenger jet was brought down in Sinai by Islamic extremists in 2015, killing all 224 on board.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi promised the attack would “not go unpunished”.
“Justice will be served against all those who participated, contributed, supported, funded, or instigated this cowardly attack,” Mr Sisi was reportedly said in a statement.
US President Donald Trump, in a tweet, called the incident a “[h]orrible and cowardly terrorist attack on innocent and defenseless worshipers [sic] in Egypt”. “The world cannot tolerate terrorism, we must defeat them militarily and discredit the extremist ideology that forms the basis of their existence!”.
