Roadside Bomb Kills 3 Soldiers in Egypt's Sinai

Three Egyptian soldiers were killed Monday and three others critically wounded in a roadside bomb attack in the restive Sinai Peninsula, police and medical officials said.

Egyptian security forces have been battling an Islamist insurgency in North Sinai since the army ousted president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013. 

"Gunmen remotely detonated a roadside bomb when a military vehicle drove by, near a security checkpoint in Sheikh Zuweid city," east of the provincial capital of El-Arish, a police official told Agence France Presse.

A health ministry official in North Sinai said three soldiers were killed and three others critically wounded.

Militant attacks in Sinai are spearheaded by a group called Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem), the Egyptian affiliate of the Islamic State group that has seized chunks of Syria and Iraq.

The group says the attacks, which have killed scores of security personnel, are in retaliation for a government crackdown against Morsi supporters that has left hundreds killed and thousands jailed.

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis has claimed some of the deadliest and most sophisticated attacks against security forces in the Sinai that neighbours Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

In the most recent one on January 29, two car bombs and a barrage of rockets hit a military base and an officers' residential complex in El-Arish leaving 30 people dead, most of them soldiers.

The army has poured troops and armour into the Sinai and is also creating a buffer zone in Rafah to prevent infiltration of militants from Gaza and the smuggling of weapons.

At least 172 militants have been killed in February in joint police and military operations in the Sinai, the army said on March 1.