CAIRO: A bomb blast near a Cairo court killed one policeman on Friday, shortly after two suicide bombers struck in Egypt’s restive Sinai Peninsula in near-simultaneous attacks that killed three people, including a soldier.

No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks but militants have carried out a series of bombings in recent months targeting Egyptian security forces and the military.

Friday’s attacks came just weeks ahead of the country’s key presidential elections — a vote in which the former military chief, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, is a front-runner. Militants have blamed el-Sissi for orchestrating a deadly crackdown on the country’s Islamic Brotherhood.

Egyptian state TV said the mid-morning explosion in Cairo’s eastern Heliopolis suburb targeted a traffic police post near the court. The state news agency MENA quoted police spokesman Abdel-Fattah Osman as saying that the blast was caused by a homemade bomb planted near the police post and that an explosives team was inspecting the site for more devices. Three policemen were also wounded in that bombing, the TV said.

In restive Sinai, two suicide bombers struck shortly after dawn in the town of El-Tor in the southern part of the peninsula.

In the first attack, the bomber targeted an army checkpoint, killing two people, including one soldier, and wounding five, according to a Health Ministry statement.

The second bomber stepped out on a road and blew himself up in front of a bus. One passenger was killed and three were wounded from that explosion. The bus driver, Saad Sulieman, who was also hurt in the explosion and spoke to reporters from the el-Tor hospital, said he saw the bomber sitting on the side of the road with an ice box before he got up and detonated his explosives.

The bombers’ body parts were scattered on both sites of the Sinai attacks and will be analyzed to determine their identities, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.