Mosque attack death toll in Egypt rises to 235

CAIRO: Gunmen attacked a packed mosque in Egypt's restive North Sinai province on Friday and set off a bomb, martyring at least 235 people in one of the country's deadliest attacks in recent memory, state media reported.

A bomb explosion ripped through the Rawda mosque roughly 40 kilometres west of the North Sinai capital of El-Arish before gunmen opened fire on the worshippers gathered for weekly Friday prayers, officials said.

State television reported at least 235 people were martyred and 120 wounded in the attack, which is unprecedented in a four-year insurgency by militant groups.

Witnesses said the assailants had surrounded the mosque with all-terrain vehicles then planted a bomb outside.

The gunmen then mowed down the panicked worshippers as they attempted to flee and used the congregants' vehicles they had set alight to block routes to the mosque.

Egypt's presidency declared three days of mourning, state television reported, as President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi met his security ministers to follow developments.

Ahmed Abul Gheit, head of the Arab League which is based in Cairo, condemned the "terrifying crime which again shows that Islam is innocent of those who follow an extremist terrorist ideology," his spokesman said in a statement.

Daesh's Egypt branch has killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers, and also civilians accused of working with the authorities, in attacks in the north of the Sinai peninsula.

The victims included civilians and conscripts praying at the mosque.

A tribal leader and head of a Bedouin militia that fights Daesh told AFP that the mosque is known as a place of gathering for Sufis.

The group has killed more than 100 Christians in church bombings and shootings in Sinai and other parts of Egypt, forcing many to flee the peninsula.

The military has struggled to quell the militants who pledged allegiance to Daesh in November 2014.

Daesh regularly conducts attacks against soldiers and policemen in the peninsula bordering Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip, although the frequency and scale of such attacks has diminished over the past year.

The militants have since increasingly turned to civilian targets, attacking not only Christians and Sufis but also Bedouin Sinai inhabitants accused of working with the army.

Aside from Daesh, Egypt also faces a threat from Al-Qaeda-aligned militants who operate out of neighbouring Libya.

A group calling itself Ansar al-Islam claimed an October ambush in Egypt's Western Desert that killed at least 16 policemen.

Many of those killed belonged to the interior ministry's secretive National Security Service.

The military later conducted air strikes on the attackers, killing their leader Emad al-Din Abdel Hamid, a most wanted militant who was a military officer before joining an Al-Qaeda-affiliated group in Libya's militant stronghold of Derna.

Trump condemns 'horrible and cowardly' attack

US President Donald Trump condemned as "horrible and cowardly" a devastating bomb and gun attack Friday that killed more than 200 people at a mosque in Egypt.

"The world cannot tolerate terrorism, we must defeat them militarily and discredit the extremist ideology that forms the basis of their existence!" he wrote on Twitter.