A roadside bombing in Egypt's restive Sinai Peninsula killed two policemen on Monday, the interior ministry announced, in the latest in a string of attacks on security forces.

The bomb exploded close to an armored vehicle on a highway near El-Arish, the provincial capital of North Sinai, it said in a statement.

Egypt and France began Sunday joint maneuvers in the Mediterranean in which French Rafale warplanes purchased by Cairo last year are taking part, the Egyptian army said.

The "Ramses 2016" military and naval exercise is being held off the coast of the Mediterranean city of Alexandria and are expected to last for several days, the army said on its Facebook page.

Egypt extradited Frenchman Christophe Naudin to the Dominican Republic on Thursday for his alleged involvement in the escape of two pilots jailed in a drugs case dubbed "Air Cocaine".

Naudin, a criminologist and aviation security expert who was arrested in Cairo on February 4, is wanted in the Caribbean nation on suspicion of helping pilots Pascal Fauret and Bruno Odos flee to France in October after they had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for trafficking.

An Egyptian military court has handed down seven death sentences for an April 2015 bombing that killed two army cadets as they waited to board a bus, an army official said.

The blast in the Nile Delta city of Kafr el-Sheikh was one of a spate of attacks that have hit the security forces since the 2013 overthrow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.

An Egyptian court sentenced a former television host to a year and six months in prison Monday for trying to shame a sexual harassment victim on her show, a judicial source said.

Riham Saeed, who hosted a controversial show, was also fined 10,000 pounds (about $1,280), and the misdemeanour court set a 15,000 pounds bail until her appeals are exhausted.

An Egyptian court on Thursday sentenced three Coptic Christian teenagers to five years in jail for contempt of Islam after they were seen in a video mocking Muslim prayers.

A judge in the central Egyptian province of Minya also sent a fourth defendant, aged 15, to a juvenile detention center for an indefinite period.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that "terrorism" caused a Russian plane crash in the Sinai Peninsula in October that killed 224 people.

"Has terrorism ended? No... Whoever downed that plane, what did he want? Just to hit tourism? No. To hit relations. To hit relations with Russia," Sisi said in a speech.

Egypt's interior ministry said on Wednesday it was still investigating the brutal killing of an Italian graduate student in Cairo, and suggested he may have fallen victim to criminals.

Giulio Regeni, a Cambridge University PhD student who was researching Egyptian labor movements, disappeared on January 25 and his badly mutilated body was found a week later.

Egypt's interior minister apologized Monday for human rights abuses committed by police after a policeman killed a driver with his service weapon in Cairo last week.

Magdy Abdel Ghaffar also said that authorities were exerting "huge efforts" to investigate last month's torture and murder of Italian student Giulio Regeni, which media in Italy suspect to have been the work of Egyptian security services.

A policeman is to stand trial for murder after a driver was shot dead in a dispute over a fare, the Egyptian prosecutor's office said Sunday, as public concern rises over police abuses.

Mustafa Mahmud is alleged to have shot dead Mohamed Ali Sayed Ismail, 26, with his police issue firearm late Thursday in central Cairo after a row over the fare for a delivery.