Egyptian officials on Tuesday brought to court the country’s Muslim Brotherhood-linked former president Mohammed Morsi to stand trial on charges relating to a 2011 jail break, as continuing violence targeting Egyptian political and security institutions continued to rock the country for the second week in a row. General Mohamed Saeed, head of the Interior Ministry’s technical office and a chief aide to Interior Minister Mohammad Ibrahim, was gunned down outside his house.

Islamist militant gunmen on a motorcycle killed a top Interior Ministry official in Cairo on Tuesday in the latest blow to a military-backed Egyptian government struggling to curb violence and suppress dissent. General Mohamed Saeed, head of the ministry’s technical office, was shot in his car outside his home in daytime. A Sinai-based militant group inspired by al Qaeda, Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, said it carried out the attack against the “apostate, criminal” Saeed.

The attack comes in the aftermath of a series of bombings last week that targeted Cairo police stations, and a few months after senior police official Mohamed Mabrouk was assassinated. Ibrahim himself had been targeted last September by a suicide bomber. Cairo’s efforts to restore stability and security have diplomatic as well as geopolitical dimensions. Egyptian leaders, up to and prominently including the country’s presumptive next president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, have explicitly criticized the U.S. for insufficient support for the army-backed government against Islamist extremists. A diplomatic snub by Washington earlier this month, involving a bilateral trade summit, threatens to erode relations further.

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