Ten people were hurt Tuesday when police in Egypt set off a controlled explosion of a bomb-rigged car in the town of El-Arish in north of the restive Sinai peninsula, security officials said.

Those wounded were in their nearby home when the explosion went off. They were taken to hospital.

An Egyptian court sentenced three Germans and six Egyptians to five years jail on Tuesday for stealing fragments of a pharaonic artifact from Cairo's Great Pyramid, a judicial source said.

A court in Giza, south of the capital, sentenced in absentia three Germans -- who had claimed they were researchers -- for stealing pieces of an ancient scroll bearing the name of the Pharaoh Khufu as well as rock samples, the source said.

Egypt's parliamentary elections will be held before the end of March 2015, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi told a visiting U.S. business delegation on Monday, his office said.

Electing a new parliament is a key step in a roadmap announced by the army after it ousted Mohammed Morsi, Egypt's first freely elected president, on July 3, 2013.

Under increasing pressure from the military, Egypt's deadliest jihadist group pledged allegiance to the Islamic State organization in a bid to boost recruitment and bolster its fight against the army, analysts say.

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem) has waged an insurgency from its Sinai Peninsula stronghold that has killed scores of Egyptian police and soldiers since the army ousted Islamist president Mohammed Morsi last year.

The leader of the Islamic State organization won the allegiance of Egypt's deadliest militant group Monday as Iraqi authorities investigated reports he had been killed or wounded in a U.S. air strike.

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, which has carried out a string of deadly attacks from its stronghold in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, said it was pledging its loyalty to the self-declared IS "caliph", Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Interior Minister Nouhad al-Mashnouq headed a security delegation to Egypt on Sunday to purchase military equipment as part of the Saudi grant to the Lebanese army, the al-Joumhouria daily reported.

"The visit aims to purchase military equipment made in Egypt," for the benefit of the army "and to put efforts together in a bid to combat the spread of terrorism," the daily said on Monday.

Egypt on Saturday announced the arrest of a U.S.-Egyptian citizen accused of having posted on jihadist websites a threat to attack American and other international schools in the region.

At the end of October, U.S. embassies in the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the mission in Egypt, called for vigilance over a threat to American schools there.

A jihadist group that has claimed several spectacular attacks on Egyptian security forces on Friday threatened new assaults against the army.

The Sinai-based Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem), the most active militant group in Egypt, said it was engaged in a "war without end."

Two people were killed Friday when supporters of Egypt's ousted president Mohammed Morsi clashed with police and residents outside Cairo, security officials said.

In the province of Fayoum, south of the capital, violence erupted after Morsi supporters staged a protest following Friday prayers, leading to the death of a 19-year-old student.

Syria's Muslim Brotherhood, one of President Bashar Assad's political adversaries in exile, has appointed a 70-year-old British-educated ophthalmologist as its new leader.

The Brotherhood's council elected Mohammad Hekmat Walid for a four-year term in a vote Thursday in Istanbul, where the Syrian opposition in exile is based, a statement said.