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Three Egyptian police officers were killed when four men, convicted on terror-related charges and awaiting their death sentences, attempted on Wednesday to escape from a notorious Cairo prison, the Interior Ministry said.

The ministry, which oversees the country’s police and prisons, said in a brief statement that security forces killed the four convicts while they were trying to flee on the southern outskirts of the Egyptian capital.

The statement did not elaborate how the convicts attempted to escape. Torture and is common in Tora Prison, where inmates are .

The four were sentenced to death in separate terror-related cases. Three of the convicted were tried and convicted in 2014 for the killing and attempted killing of several members of the Egyptian security forces.

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They were among over 20 defendants charged with carrying out militant attacks following the military's 2013 overthrow of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Since the coup, Egyptian authorities have imprisoned tens of thousands of people on trumped-up political and ‘terror’ charges and human rights groups have.

Hundreds of people have been sentenced to death by courts whose .

The fourth man who escaped, allegedly a supporter of, was convicted of . The defendant was sentenced to death in 2018.

An Islamist insurgency, spearheaded by a local affiliate of Islamic State, has been ongoing in Egypt for years, but it is mostly confined to the Sinai peninsula. The insurgency exacerbated after the coup against Morsi.

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