An Egyptian military aircraft crashed while on a training mission on Sunday after a technical failure, killing six soldiers, the army said.

The aircraft crashed in an area about 100 kilometers (62 miles) south of Cairo, an army statement said.

Israel said on Sunday it would send a delegation to attend indirect Gaza truce talks with Hamas in Cairo next week, although a minister said they would likely achieve nothing. 

Confirmation that Israel would return to the Egyptian capital on Tuesday to resume negotiations on cementing an August 26 ceasefire agreement which halted 50 days of bloodshed in Gaza, came from a senior Israeli official, who refused to give further details. 

At least two policemen were killed Sunday in a bombing near a checkpoint outside Egypt's foreign ministry headquarters, officials said, shattering a months-long respite from deadly attacks in Cairo.

The blast brought down a tree onto a car, meters (yards) from a pool of blood where one victim had fallen, an Agence France-Presse correspondent said.

A twist of fate stopped Abu Fahd boarding a doomed migrant boat that sank off Malta with hundreds aboard, but the Syrian and his family are already plotting another perilous voyage.

Abu Fahd, his wife and five children were supposed to take a vessel from a beach on the outskirts of Egypt's Mediterranean city of Damietta but they missed it and were arrested by the military.

In his white prison uniform, Sherif Farag was forced to present his thesis behind bars where he spent months without trial, a procedure Egypt's government is accused of using to silence its opponents.

A leading activist of Egypt's 2011 revolution, Alaa Abdel Fattah, demanded on Wednesday the scrapping of a disputed protest law that the authorities imposed last year to crush opposition rallies.

Abdel Fattah, a symbol of the uprising that toppled former autocratic president Hosni Mubarak, was released on bail Monday during a retrial after being sentenced to 15 years in jail.

Egypt on Wednesday blamed organized criminal gangs of people traffickers operating on its territory after a boat carrying 500 illegal migrants was intentionally capsized off Malta.

The migrants, including up to 100 children, drowned after smugglers sank their ship when the passengers refused to change to a smaller vessel, survivors said.

Egypt's deadliest militant group has claimed the killing of six policemen in a roadside bomb in the Sinai Peninsula, where security forces frequently clash with jihadists.

Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem) has orchestrated a string of attacks to avenge a deadly government crackdown on supporters of ousted Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.

At least nine Egyptians were killed and 30 people injured, including an American and a Russian, in a tourist bus accident in southern Egypt on Tuesday, officials said.

The bus collided with another vehicle near the city of Beni Suef, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) south of Cairo, while traveling along a desert road from the temple city of Luxor to the Egyptian capital.

A bomb hit an Egyptian security force convoy in the Sinai Peninsula on Tuesday, killing six policemen in the restive region where jihadists launch regular attacks.