Egyptian police on Thursday arrested the Cairo bureau chief of an Iranian news station and a former Islamist lawmaker, security officials said.

Ahmed Fahim Abdel Azim al-Suifi, the Egyptian head of the Cairo office of Iran's Arab-language station Al-Alam, was arrested in an apartment with ex-senate member Essam Ismail Farrag, the officials said.

A sniper shot dead an Egyptian soldier Wednesday in the lawless Sinai Peninsula where the army has been waging a relentless campaign to root out militants, a security official said.

The 20-year-old conscript was killed while training at a military camp in Sheikh Zuwayed, the official said.

An Egyptian court on Wednesday dismissed a request by the Muslim Brotherhood for an injunction on a court ruling banning the Islamist movement and ordering its assets seized, judicial sources said.

A court in September had banned the Islamist movement from operating amid a fierce crackdown on the Brotherhood following the July ouster of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi.

The Reporters Without Borders watchdog on Tuesday condemned Egypt's arrest and military trials of journalists and denounced the suspension of a popular television show by a controversial satirist.

"This new wave of threats to freedom of information in Egypt is especially disturbing," the group said.

A French woman who went missing during a transit stop in Egypt between flights was found on Tuesday, an official at the French embassy in Cairo said.

"She was found this morning and was offered the required services of the embassy to help her return to France as soon as possible," the official said, refusing to say any more.

The failure of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi's supporters to stage large protests at his trial reflects the dwindling power of his Muslim Brotherhood following a deadly military crackdown.

Morsi's insistence in a Cairo court on Monday that he remains Egypt's president, and his subsequent transfer to a prison cell, could further polarize the already deeply divided country following months of unrest.

The United Arab Emirates' state security court on Tuesday began the trial of 30 Emiratis and Egyptians charged with setting up an illegal branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The conservative monarchies of the Gulf have long viewed the Brotherhood -- a grass-roots movement founded in Egypt more than 80 years ago -- as a threat because of its political activism and advocacy for Islamic governance.

Detained incommunicado since his July ouster, Mohammed Morsi practically burst into the defendants' cage as his murder trial began Monday to declare that he is still Egypt's president.

It was in the same court -- and in the same cage -- that his predecessor Hosni Mubarak stood trial on similar charges over the deaths of protesters during the first of Egypt's two revolts in three years.

About 100 supporters of Egypt's deposed Islamist president Mohammed Morsi demonstrated in Sudan on Monday against the start of his trial in Cairo over the deaths of protesters.

The group, carrying pictures of the bearded Morsi, gathered across from Egypt's embassy in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, an Agence France Presse reporter said.

Egypt's deposed President Mohammed Morsi appeared in court Monday on the first day of his trial, rejecting its legitimacy and demanding "coup" leaders be prosecuted, as thousands of his supporters rallied.

In his first public appearance four months after the military toppled him, Morsi was indignant and outraged as he attended the courtroom at a police academy in east Cairo.