Gunmen shot dead a Salafist candidate in Egypt’s parliamentary elections in North Sinai on Saturday

Gunmen shot dead a Salafist candidate in Egypt's parliamentary elections in North Sinai on Saturday, officials said, where extremists are waging an insurgency against the government.

Mostafa Abdel Rahman, a candidate for ultraconservative Salafist Al-Nur party which is seen as pro-government, was gunned down by two assailants on a motorbike outside his home in the town of El-Arish, police officials said.

Nur was the only prominent Salafist party to emerge unscathed from a crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood supporters following the military overthrow of president Mohammad Mursi in 2013, having supported his ouster by then army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

With Mursi's Brotherhood blacklisted, and thousands of its activists killed or detained, the Nur party remained as the main Islamist grouping contesting the parliamentary elections that began on October 18.

Sisi, who is now president, is contending with a fierce insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula by ISIL (so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Levant) affiliated militants who have branded his government as apostate, and elections as a heretical practice.

Police officials say they believe extremists targeted the candidate to undermine the elections.

Abdel Rahman, who also acted as the North Sinai secretary general for the party, would be the first politician killed by militants in the two-year insurgency since Mursi's overthrow.

On Saturday, the ISIL group claimed credit for two roadside bombings in El-Arish over the past 48 hours that killed four policemen.

It also said it had planted a bomb at a Cairo intersection flanked by hotels near the pyramids, which wounded four people when police tried to defuse it on Friday.

Egypt had tightened security for the multi-stage election, which runs from October 18 to December 2.

The election was part of a promised transition to democracy by Sisi after he overthrew Mursi.

Turnout in the first round on October 18 was relatively low, with only 26.6 percent of registered voters casting ballots, according to an electoral commission official.

That was a sharp drop from the 62 percent registered in the first stage of the last parliamentary poll, held in 2011 months after the ouster of longtime president Hosni Mubarak.