- Egypt's Christians rang in the new year Wednesday with prayers for peace after months of unrest, but expressed no regrets over backing the military's overthrow of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi.

Coptic Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt's 86 million people and constitute the largest Christian community in the Middle East, have long complained of official discrimination and feared attacks by radical Islamists.

Egyptian secret police have arrested an award-winning Australian journalist and an Egyptian reporter for the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera channel on suspicion of illegally broadcasting news harming "domestic security,” the interior ministry said.

Officers of the National Security service raided their makeshift bureau at a Cairo hotel on Sunday, arresting the two and confiscating their equipment, the ministry said in a statement.

A student was killed and more than 100 arrested as police clashed with students who set fire to Cairo university building on Saturday, in an intensifying crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, officials said.

The unrest followed nationwide repression of Islamist protests on Friday after the military-installed government listed the Brotherhood, the movement of deposed president Mohammed Morsi, as a terrorist organisation.

Three people were killed in clashes and 265 arrested in Egypt on Friday in a crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations after the movement was labelled a terrorist group, police said.

The military-installed government has banned protests by Brotherhood members demanding the reinstatement of deposed president Mohammed Morsi, after listing the movement as a terrorist organisation on Wednesday.

A bomb exploded near a bus in Cairo Thursday injuring five people, a day after the government widened a crackdown on Islamists by declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist group.

The windows of the red and black public transport bus were shattered in the explosion at a busy intersection in the north Cairo neighborhood of Nasr City.

Police in Egypt said an Islamist militant blew himself up in his hideout to escape arrest on Thursday, wounding an officer in the process.

The militant had been holed up in a north Cairo apartment when police raided the building and he set off the explosives when surrounded, police said.

An Egyptian Copt was sentenced Saturday to life in prison as 10 others got jail terms from six months to 15 years over sectarian deaths in April, judicial sources said.

Seven people -- five Christians, one Muslim and an unidentified man -- were killed when sectarian violence erupted in Al-Khusus, north of Cairo, after a Muslim objected to children drawing a swastika on a religious institute.

Muslim Brotherhood-linked theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi has resigned from the governing body of Cairo's Al-Azhar, accusing the top Sunni seat of learning of supporting Egypt's military-installed government.

"I submit my resignation," Qaradawi wrote on Twitter and his Facebook page on Monday, accusing the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayyeb, of "abusing the authority of the office to support the military coup."

Turkey's ambassador to Cairo has returned home after being expelled in a diplomatic spat over Ankara's support for Egypt's ousted Islamist president, the foreign ministry said Thursday.

The row erupted at the weekend after Turkish Prime Minister Prime Recep Tayyip Erdogan again criticized the military "coup" in Egypt that ousted president Mohamed Morsi in July.

At least one person was killed when Egyptian riot police stormed Cairo's Tahrir Square late Tuesday to disperse stone-throwing protesters, a health ministry official said.

Police backed by armored vehicles fired tear gas and shots after clashes in the square to scatter protesters who had gathered to mark the anniversary of deadly 2011 demonstrations.