A spate of explosions in Egypt over the long weekend marking the birthday of Prophet Mohamed culminated in the detonation of a bomb at a church attached to the Coptic Christian Cathedral that claimed two dozen lives and left many injured.

The incidents show an escalation of the urban guerilla campaign launched by Islamist militants amidst mounting popular discontent against the current government’s socially painful austerity measures, which observers say could lead to a return to emergency rule.

A remote-controlled car bomb exploded in Cairo’s Haram district close to the pyramids on December 9 took the lives of six policemen, including two officers. An Egyptian Islamist militant group calling itself Hasm (Decisive in Arabic), thought to be affiliated with the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, claimed responsibility for the incident.  The Haram attack came on the heels of another explosion targeting a police vehicle earlier the same day in the Delta governorate of Kafr El Sheikh, killing a civilian motorist and injuring three policemen.

However, the deadliest incident over the weekend was a bomb detonated at the St Peter and St Paul Church attached to the main Coptic Christian Cathedral in Cairo’s Abbassyia district, killing at least 25 and injuring 49, including many women and children. The incident marks the largest attack against the minority Christian population in majority Muslim Egypt since a bomb exploded on New Year’s Eve 2010 at a church in Alexandria on the Mediterranean.

The mounting terror campaign triggered calls from a member of the human rights committee of the Egyptian parliament for the government to impose emergency rule. If implemented, emergency rule would suspend civil rights giving security forces wide scale arrest and detention powers. The Egyptian government had lifted a 30-year long emergency rule in wake of the popular uprising that toppled long-serving President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak in January 2011.