Gunmen shot dead an Egyptian policeman outside a museum and three suspected militants were killed in a car explosion in a suburb of the Egyptian capital on Tuesday, police said.

The attack and blast came a day after the top prosecutor was killed in a car bombing in Cairo, prompting President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to pledge tough new laws to fight Islamist militants.

A visibly angry Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi pledged tougher laws against militants and suggested fast track executions at the funeral on Tuesday of the state prosecutor assassinated in a car bombing.

Hisham Barakat died in hospital after a car bomb tore through his convoy in Cairo on Monday morning, the most senior official killed by Islamist insurgents who have bedeviled the country.

Two years after the army ousted president Mohamed Morsi, Egypt has regressed into "all-out repression", with activists jailed in a bid to crush dissent, Amnesty International warned on Tuesday.

The London-based human rights watchdog said that Egyptian authorities led by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi are engaged in a blatant attempt to "nip in the bid any future threat to their rule".

The White House condemned a bomb attack that killed Egypt's top prosecutor Monday, vowing to work with Cairo to "fight the scourge of terrorism."

"The United States strongly condemns today’s terrorist attack in Cairo that killed Egyptian Prosecutor-General Hisham Barakat and injured at least nine others," said National Security Council spokesman Ned Price.

Egypt's state prosecutor was killed in a powerful bombing that hit his convoy in Cairo on Monday following jihadist calls for attacks on the judiciary to avenge a crackdown on Islamists.

The health ministry and senior officials including Justice Minister Ahmed al-Zind told AFP that Hisham Barakat had died in hospital several hours after the morning bombing in the upscale district of Heliopolis in east Cairo.

A Cairo court Sunday sentenced to one year in jail an Egyptian female dancer who featured in a controversial music video, accusing her of inciting debauchery, a judicial official said.

Reda El-Fouly was arrested in May after she appeared singing and dancing, and wearing a revealing dress, in a video that went viral on the Internet.

Egypt faces treacherous weather conditions as a sandstorm blanketed the north of the country and a 5.2 earthquake centered in the Sinai peninsula shook buildings more than 200 miles away in the capital, Cairo.

Airports near Alexandria and Marsa Matrouh, along the Mediterranean coast, closed and diverted flights to Cairo due to poor visibility from the day's sandstorm, Civil Aviation Minister Hossam Kamel said.

Meters from the epicenter of Egypt's uprising, bulldozers tear chunks of concrete and twisted metal from what remains of the headquarters of ousted strongman Hosni Mubarak's now disbanded party.

During the heady days of the 2011 revolution, protesters set fire to the National Democratic Party (NDP) building, seen as a symbol of decades of corruption and police abuse, next to Cairo's iconic Tahrir Square.

Muslim clerics condemned three militant attacks in Tunisia, Kuwait and France on Friday that killed dozens of people including holidaymakers.

Al-Azhar, a leading Sunni Muslim institution based in Egypt, said the "heinous" shooting at a Tunisian coastal resort which killed 28 people, mostly Europeans, was a "violation of all religious and humanitarian norms."

With scenes of religious coexistence and vintage elegance in a more cosmopolitan era, an Egyptian soap opera aims to dispel prejudice towards the country's long-vilified and nearly extinct Jewish community.

"The Jewish Quarter" shows life inside Cairo's Haret al-Yahud district during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, depicting an almost idyllic portrait of a society where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived side by side.