Egypt’s state prosecutor Hisham Barakat has been killed after his motorcade was hit by a bomb blast in the capital Cairo.

An earlier report said that Barakat had been suffering from “internal bleeding” and that he was undergoing surgery on Monday at the Nozha hospital in the Egyptian capital.

Three other people were injured in the attack, which took place in the Heliopolis district of the capital.

Local newspaper Al-Ahram reported that the attack took place outside Cairo’s military college.

Barakat was appointed prosecutor-general by Egypt’s then interim-President Adly Mansour in July 2013, shortly after the military ousted the country’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

The new state prosecutor then set about freezing the assets of 15 prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood and ordered the arrest of the group’s leader, Mohamed Badie, on charges of inciting violence outside the Republican Guard headquarters where 51 people were killed.

The country has since sentenced Morsi, and hundred of his supporters, to death, in mass trials that have been condemned by rights groups.

Judges and other officials have increasingly been targeted by armed groups opposed to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and apparently angered by hefty prison sentences imposed on members of the now-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

Last month, Egypt’s affilliate of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group urged followers to attack judges, opening a new front in the world’s most populous Arab state.

Earlier in the same month, three judges were shot dead in the northern Sinai city of al-Arish. Al Jazeera