A police officer has been gunned down by assailants in the city of Beni Suef south of the Egyptian capital, Cairo.

Security sources said that police captain Mohamed Sorour, who worked for the investigations department at the Beni Suef police station, was targeted early Thursday outside his residence near the site of the military police zone in the city, a Press TV correspondent reported.

Alaa Ezzat, the undersecretary for the Minsitry of Health in Beni Suef, confirmed the policeman's death, who succumbed to neck and chest wounds shortly after he arrived at the city's general hospital.

The slain policeman's car was also reportedly targeted by Molotov cocktails at the premises of his residence in the supposedly highly fortified zone of Beni Suef.

Earlier, and also in the first hours of Thursday in Egypt, a bomb planted by assailants under a car, exploded near a gas station in the city of Dairoot, in the upper Egypt province of Assyut.

Civil defense officials confirmed that their units were able to control the fire caused by the hand-made bombs and prevent it from spreading.

In other incidents of violence in Egypt earlier, security sources in the Nile Delta province of al-Monoufiya said that assailants had torched a police truck in the province on Wednesday.

Assailants again fled the scene while no injuries were reported in the incident.

There was no claim of responsibility for Thursday's and Wednesday's incidents.

Similar acts, on the rise in Egypt as of late, have been claimed by anonymous groups, who call themselves "revolutionary punishment groups."

The military-backed government of former army chief and now president Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi accuses the now outlawed Muslim Brotherhood (MB) of being behind a big wave of terrorist activities in the country, including in the restive Sinai peninsula and in the heartland.

The government alleges that the Brotherhood has ties with ISIL-linked militants who have claimed responsibility for several deadly Sinia bombings, and to the so called "revolutionary punishment groups."

The Brotherhood denies the accusations, and has repeatedly called for a peaceful struggle, trying to replicate the popular revolution that ousted longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak over four years ago.

The MB has also called for retribution against whom it calls the "bloody coup authorities" in reference to Sisi's government, which overthrew the country's first democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi two years ago.

Morsi was last month handed the death sentence for allegedly orchestrating a 2011 jail break during the events of the revolution that ousted Mubarak.

Egyptians fear that president Sisi's latest calls for the speeding up of trials related to terrorism cases means an imminent execution of the death sentence against Morsi, and hundreds of other Brotherhood cadres, something that could drag the country into all-out chaos.