Top Prosecutor’s Death Presages Long, Hot Summer in Egypt

Egypt’s top public prosecutor was killed Monday in a car bombing in Cairo – the country’s highest-profile assassination since the July 2013 ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi. The death of the prosecutor, Hisham Barakat, marks the gravest escalation yet in extremist attacks on state officials, and underscores the mounting threat of terrorism in the heart of the Egyptian capital.

The attack, in Cairo’s affluent Garden City neighborhood, is the first attempt to assassinate a high-ranking official since the 2013 suicide bombing that unsuccessfully targeted then-Interior Minister Mohammed Ibrahim. While no one has yet claimed responsibility, Monday’s blast came a month after “Sinai Province” – the extremist group in the Sinai Peninsula loyal to Islamic State – called for attacks on Egypt’s judiciary to avenge the courts’ heavy hand against the organization and Islamists generally. On Sunday, just a day before Barakat’s assassination, Sinai Province released a video (unambiguously titled “Eliminating the Judges”) showing its members firing on a vehicle that it said had been transporting judges.

As for the government, within hours of Monday’s attack it had already pinned blame on the usual suspect: “the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood.” The true culprit is not likely the Brotherhood, which despite its own increasingly belligerent rhetoric is loath to indulge the regime by committing the kind of brazen terrorism of which Cairo habitually accuses it. Still, vengeance for Morsi’s ouster and the subsequent anti-Islamist crackdown are the shared motivations for the various, often disorganized extremists who have carried out much of the violence of the last two years. It is no coincidence that Monday’s blast came a day before planned government celebrations marking Morsi’s removal, which supporters hail as a popular revolution and detractors as a coup.

Barakat’s death will exacerbate what is already a national security crisis. Last month saw 138 attacks across Egypt – the highest monthly toll in the country’s history. Moreover, while terrorism has long been concentrated mainly in the sparsely populated Sinai, recent months have seen a growing threat to the country’s heartland in and around Cairo.

In response, the government has launched a large-scale security crackdown that has seen tens of thousands arrested – mainly accused Islamists or their sympathizers – and hundreds killed. The response to the latest attack will likely up the ante further: new counterterror operations in the Sinai and on the mainland, along with waves of arrests and trials potentially carrying death sentences.

As the dust and smoke settle on Garden City, a sense of foreboding is gripping Egypt: that its long summer may be not just sweltering as always, but particularly bloody.

Oren Kessler is deputy director for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @OrenKessler