A car bomb killed Egypt’s top prosecutor yesterday, ripping through his convoy in a Cairo neighbourhood, in the first assassination of a top official in the country in a quarter century, marking an apparent escalation by Islamic militants in their campaign of revenge attacks for a 2-year-old crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Hisham Barakat led the widescale prosecution against figures from the Brotherhood and other Islamists, including former President Mohammed Morsi, who was ousted by the military in July 2013. The crackdown against the group has seen the courts handing down mass death sentences against Morsi and other Islamist

The militants, who for years had been fighting in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, widened their insurgency after the military’s ouster of Morsi, which was prompted by massive protests against his rule. Egyptian authorities accuse the Brotherhood of involvement in the violence and have branded it a terror group, a claim the group denies.

Militant attacks have focused on police and the military, but in recent months have turned to target the judiciary, with the killings of several judges in Sinai earlier this year.

The killing also recalled one of Egypt’s darkest chapters in 1990s when Islamic militant groups and state security apparatus were engaged in score-settling killings for nearly a decade.

In 1990, militants gunned down then-parliament speaker Rifaat el-Mahgoub in downtown Cairo, the last time a senior official was assassinated, though they made multiple subsequent attempts against other ministers until the insurgency was crushed in the late 1990s.

Monday’s attack took place around 10:00 a.m. when a car laden with large amount of explosives was detonated by a remote control as Barakat’s car and his entourage passed through the eastern Cairo district of Heliopolis.

The 65-year-old Barakat received multiple shrapnel wounds to the shoulder, chest and liver, according to a medical official at the nearby Nozha hospital. His two guards and five other people were also wounded by the explosion, officials said.

Hours after the attack, he was announced dead after undergoing a critical surgery, according to Egypt’s state news agency MENA.

Footage from the scene of the blast showed cars charred and wrecked from the explosion, as black smoke rose from the site. Several trees had caught fire and firefighters were dousing the area to extinguish the flames.

Several charred cars blocked the street and a dozen others were wrecked or damaged. In nearby buildings, ground-floor shops, apartment balconies and windows were shattered several stories up from the street. Residents, some sobbing, were going through the debris.

Security forces cordoned off the area shortly after the blast. (AP)