The first day of a three-month long curfew in some parts of Egypt's North Sinai governroate started at 5pm on Saturday, the governor announced. The curfew comes as part of a state of emergency declared in North Sinai pn Saturday, a day after two militant attacks in the governorate left 31 army personnel dead and over 30 injured. No militant group has yet come forward to claim responsibility for the attacks, a checkpoint car bomb that killed 28 soldiers or a subsequent shooting that killed three others, although local jihadist group Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis has in the past claimed responsibility for many similar attacks. Security forces patrolled streets of local towns on Saturday to remind shopkeepers of the curfew, which will last from 5pm to 7am daily. The curfew is being applied along a strip of coastline from the Rafah border with Gaza to the coastal city of Al-Arish. Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi on Saturday blamed the deadly attacks on foreign parties, saying that Egypt is experiencing an "existential war." A militant insurgency by jihadist groups in the peninsula has become more active since the ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi in 2013. Hundreds of police and soldiers, as well as militants, have been killed. http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/113937.aspx
