Egypt’s former mufti and pro-government cleric Ali Gomaa has survived an assassination attempt on the outskirts of the capital Cairo.

The Egyptian Interior Ministry said in a statement on Friday that gunmen fired at Gomaa while he was approaching a mosque to lead the Friday prayers in the city of 6th of October.

The ministry added that the mufti’s guards exchanged fire with the gunmen who were hiding in a park.

The statement further said the gunmen subsequently fled the area, adding that one of the cleric’s guards was slightly injured in the gun battle.

Gomaa later told Egyptian state television that he had taken shelter behind the mosque’s wall when the attack began.

He added that he delivered his Friday sermon despite the attack as "a message to these people," describing the assault as an attempt to create fear.

The senior cleric later said in another interview with the private CBC Extra news channel that this was not the first assassination attempt.

He attributed the latest attack to the Egyptian army's killing of a commander of the Daesh Takfiri terrorists operating in the Sinai Peninsula on Thursday.

Abu Duaa al-Ansari, the commander of the Sinai branch of Daesh, was killed in a series of airstrikes near the town of Arish.

Gomaa held the position of mufti, the government’s official interpreter of the Islamic law, from 2003 to 2013.

A harsh critic of the Muslim Brotherhood, Gomaa backed the army's overthrow of the first democratically-elected president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013 and the subsequent suppression of his supporters. The Egyptian government has been engaged in a crackdown on the opposition since the ouster of Morsi in July that year.