CAIRO: Egyptian police have killed six militants in a shootout in the restive northern Sinai region, the interior ministry said Monday.
The firefight broke out as police forces raided a hideout of “terrorist elements” intent on carrying out “hostile operations,” it said.
Egypt’s security forces are battling a long-running insurgency in the peninsula, spearheaded by a local affiliate of the Daesh group.
Weapons and explosives were found in the militants’ possession, the ministry added, in a statement released along with gruesome photos of the slain militants.
The date of the raid was not specified.
The Islamist insurgency in North Sinai escalated following the military’s 2013 ouster of Islamist President Muhammad Mursi.
Scores of policemen and soldiers have since been killed in militant attacks.
Last month, Daesh said it had blown up a gas pipeline in the Sinai Peninsula, saying it was connected to Israel.
Security sources however said the targeted pipeline was a domestic one.
Cairo launched a nationwide operation against militants in February 2018, mainly focusing on North Sinai province.
Since then, over 845 suspected militants have been killed in the region along with more than 60 security personnel, according to army figures.
Egypt police say killed 6 militants in northern Sinai
https://arab.news/cppxs
Egypt police say killed 6 militants in northern Sinai
- The firefight broke out as police forces raided a hideout of “terrorist elements”
- Egypt’s security forces are battling a long-running insurgency in the peninsula
Internet blackout leaves anxious Iranians in the dark
PARIS: Iran’s internet is still “around 1 percent of ordinary levels,” monitor Netblocks said on Thursday, leaving most Iranians struggling to access independent news or communicate with the outside world.
Iranian authorities shut off internet access on Saturday after Israel and the US began air strikes, plunging the country into an information blackout.
“Iran’s internet blackout has now exceeded 120 hours with connectivity still flatlining around 1 percent of ordinary levels,” internet monitor Netblocks said in a message posted on social media platform X on Thursday.
Some Iranians are finding brief moments of the day when they are able to connect and send messages, while others have resorted to using illegal Starlink subscriptions. Calls to Iran from overseas to mobile phones or landlines are near-impossible.
“The internet speed is very slow,” a Tehran resident said by message, asking to remain anonymous for security reasons. “You can’t call and voice messages don’t get delivered. We can just text.”
Netblocks said that Iranian telecoms companies were now sending messages to “threaten users who try to connect to the global internet with legal action.”
“The internet situation here is abysmal,” a resident in Bukan in western Iran, said in a message. “It connects and disconnects. The connection is slow, so the VPNs don’t work.”
In normal circumstances, Iranians use VPNs to connect to Western internet services such as Instagram that are banned in Iran.
Others with working internet connections are helping out others.
Shima, a 33-year-old in Tehran, said that she was helping friends by sending news of life in the capital, which has been hit by waves of missile and bombing strikes since Saturday.
“I need to call a lot of people, even strangers, on behalf of their families,” she said.
