A New Cairo car explosion on Thursday evening was targeting the country's top prosecutor's assistant, Egypt's interior ministry said in a statement.

The ministry said the car bomb exploded as the top prosecutor-general's deputy Zakaria Abd El-Aziz was passing in a convoy in the First Settlement area of New Cairo.

The ministry added that Abd El-Aziz and his guards were not injured, though that a citizen in the area was injured and transferred to hospital.

Security forces were shortly dispatched to the scene, closing off the road and combing the area to arrest the assailants.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.

In June 2015, Egypt's top prosecutor Hisham Barakat was assassinated in a Cairo bomb attack.

Barakat, 64, was killed when a car bomb struck his convoy in the upscale eastern Cairo district of Heliopolis last year.

Sixty-seven people were referred to the criminal court over the assassination of Barakat, where the general-prosecution accused the defendants of being members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood who "conspired" with militants of the Gaza-based Islamist Palestinian group Hamas to kill the Egypt's top attorney

Hamas denied any involvement in the assassination.