A senior operative in an Egyptian militant group was killed in a shootout with police officers who were attempting to carry out an arrest warrant against him in El-Marg district in northeastern Cairo, the interior minister said in a statement on Monday.

The ministry said that the suspect, Ashraf Al-Gharabli, was a member of the Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis militant group, who proclaimed allegience to Islamic State terrorist group late 2014, and was the mastermind and perpetrator of several high-profile terrorist attacks in the country.

Al-Gharabli was implicated in a series attacks including a failed assassination attempt on a former interior minister late in 2013, a July car bombing at the Italian consulate in central Cairo, a suicide bombing at a tourist site in Luxor as well as several militant attacks on security checkpoints, the statement added.

He was also implicated in the murder of a Croatian and an American national in Egypt.

Al-Gharabli was convicted and sentenced to death in absentia in May over an attack on soldiers in the Arab Sharkas village, north of Cairo, in which two army officers were killed.  Six members of Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis were executed in May over the same case.