Egypt attacks kill eight and heighten security fears Suspected Islamist militants killed at least eight members of the security services in two separate attacks in Egypt in an escalation of violence a day after 53 people were killed in a crackdown by the authorities on protests by supporters of Mohamed Morsi, the ousted president. Gunmen shot dead five soldiers in a car at a checkpoint near the city of Ismailia in the economically-vital Suez Canal zone. In a separate incident, a car bomb demolished the police headquarters in the South Sinai town of Tur, killing three people and injuring 48. The increasingly-lawless Sinai peninsula has been the scene of dozens of attacks by militants against police and army targets, but the violence has been mainly confined to the north, away from the south, where tourist resorts are concentrated. In Cairo, attackers fired rocket propelled grenades at a satellite broadcasting station in the suburb of Maadi in yet another incident highlighting the wave of insecurity sweeping the country since the ouster of Mr Morsi by a popularly-backed army coup. On Sunday police had used live ammunition and teargas to disperse marches by thousands of opponents of the coup determined to reach Tahrir Square in central Cairo. A pro-army celebration marking the day Egyptian troops stormed Israeli forces occupying the Sinai in 1973 was in full swing in the square. The Egyptian authorities have arrested some three thousand supporters of Mr Morsi, most of them from his Muslim Brotherhood group, which has been decapitated with the detention of the top two tiers of its leadership. Islamists, however, say they are determined to fight back and have called for more protests on violence Friday. The upsurge in violence threatens a much-hoped for recovery in tourism and investment, both mainstays of the Egyptian economy. The country has been surviving in recent months on injections of cash from oil-rich Gulf states supportive of the toppling of Mr Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood group. Observers in Egypt and abroad, however, fear that the continued repression of Mr Morsi's Islamist supporters could further fuel the insurgency by al-Qaeda-inspired militants in the Sinai and radicalise moderate Islamist youth by pushing some into violence. In a statement on Monday, Britain said it was concerned by the "large-scale violence" in Egypt. "The only sustainable way for Egypt to address its current challenges is through an inclusive political process which allows all Egyptians a voice in the country's future," said a statement from the Foreign Office. On Monday, in his first interview with an Egyptian newspaper, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the defence minister who toppled Mr Morsi in July said that he told the former president as long ago as April that the Brotherhood's project was "finished." He insisted the army had not wanted a coup and had tried to nudge the former president into taking an initiative that would heal divisions as protests against his rule escalated. Gen Sisi charged that the Islamists "had no understanding of the state," and that their belief in a Pan-Islamic caliphate - a supranational Islamic government - was at odds with the notion of loyalty to the nation state. The defence minister has said repeatedly that he has no ambitions to become president, but supporters have mounted a campaign to persuade him to run for office. On Sunday, a musical spectacle to mark the anniversary of the 1973 war broadcast live on state television praised the general as the country's saviour. At one point a sentence from one of Gen Sisi's speeches was set to music in a paean to the minister strongly reminiscent of psycophantic performances honouring Hosni Mubarak, the president toppled by a revolution in 2011.