A car bomb injured six Egyptian policemen Thursday as it exploded in front of a police building in Cairo, the interior ministry said, the latest in a wave of militant attacks that has rocked Egypt.

A car bomb injured six Egyptian policemen Thursday as it exploded in front of a police building in Cairo, the interior ministry said, the latest in a wave of militant attacks that has rocked Egypt.

The powerful blast in northern Cairo's district of Shubra came in the middle of the night, as Egyptian security forces are being targeted by terrorists linked to the so-called 'Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant' (ISIL) takfiri group.

"A man suddenly stopped his car in front of the state security building, jumped out of it and fled on a motorbike that followed the car," the ministry statement said.

"The car exploded wounding six policemen."

Earlier a security official told AFP that "an attack targeted a state security building".

"The explosion partially destroyed the building," said a colleague on condition of anonymity.

ISIL claimed responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on an affiliated Twitter account.

"The soldiers of the Islamic State managed to target a police building with a car bomb in the heart of Cairo," the statement said.

It said the attack was revenge for the hanging of six members of its Egyptian affiliate -- known as "Sinai Province" -- in May.


The bombing came just days after President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ratified an anti-terrorism law which critics claim gives wider powers to police, restricts human rights and muzzles the press.

No one has yet claimed responsibility for Thursday's attack, but Sinai Province, the Egyptian branch of the ISIL group regularly carries out attacks on security services as part of an insurgency that has swelled since the army's ouster of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammad Mursi in July 2013.

Hundreds more have been sentenced to death after speedy trials, denounced by the United Nations as "unprecedented" in recent history.