CAIRO (AFP) – Egypt mourned on Saturday as the death toll from a gun and bomb assault on a mosque in the Sinai Peninsula soared above 300, including children, in the deadliest attack the country has witnessed.
The army said warplanes had struck militant hideouts in the insurgency-wracked North Sinai in retaliation.
According to the state prosecution, up to 30 militants in camouflage flying the Islamic State group’s black banner had surrounded the mosque and massacred the worshippers during weekly Friday prayers.
Twenty-seven children were among the dead, it said.
IS has not claimed responsibility for the attack, but it is the main suspect as the mosque is associated with followers of the mystical Sufi branch of Sunni Islam whom it has branded heretics.
Funerals for the victims were held overnight and many were buried unwashed in their bloodied clothes, according to the Islamic burial practices for martyrs, security and medical officials said.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi declared three days of mourning and vowed to “respond with brutal force” to the attack, among the deadliest in the world since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
“The army and police will avenge our martyrs and return security and stability with force in the coming short period,” he said in a televised speech.
Hours later Egyptian air force jets pursued the “terrorists and discovered several vehicles used in the terrorist attack, killing those inside near the vicinity of the attack,” an army spokesman said.
The state prosecutor’s office said in a statement that 305 people were killed and 128 wounded in the assault on the Rawda mosque in a village roughly 40 kilometers west of the North Sinai capital of El-Arish.
It said the attackers, with long beards and hair often seen on jihadists, arrived in five all-terrain vehicles and surrounded the mosque.
Witnesses said they heard gunshots and explosions before the assailants entered the mosque, according to the prosecution.
“Nobody in that mosque escaped unharmed,” said the brother of the mosque’s imam, or prayer leader, Mohamed Abdel Fattah.
“He was shot in the foot,” the brother, Ahmed, told AFP in a phone call, adding that the religious leader was still in ”too much shock” to speak.
One of the wounded, Magdy Rizk, told AFP assailants wore masks and military uniforms, and that extremists had previously threatened people in the area.
