A Syrian police officer was killed and four others were wounded on Wednesday in a car bomb attack that was claimed by the Islamic State group.
The Syrian interior ministry said a vehicle exploded at the Barzeh police station in Damascus, killing a lieutenant colonel and wounding four others.
"Investigations are ongoing to discover the circumstances of the incident," it said in a statement, posting images of a mangled, burned vehicle.
The IS group later claimed responsibility for the attack, it said in a statement on its Telegram channels.
It was a rare jihadi attack in Damascus, which has been largely spared such violence in recent years, especially since the government retook the last rebel bastion near the capital in 2018.
But security incidents, including blasts targeting military or civilian vehicles, occur intermittently in Damascus.
Sometimes they are part of personal disputes or score-settling in the country, where the security situation is tenuous more than 12 years after its civil war erupted, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor.
In October 2022, a bomb attack on a Syrian army bus near Damascus killed at least 24 soldiers. The Observatory attributed that attack to IS cells.
The IS group's caliphate that once included swaths of Syria and Iraq shrank to its death in eastern Syria in early 2019.
The conflict in Syria has killed more than 500,000 people, displaced millions, and battered the country's infrastructure and industry.
While the front lines are now mostly quiet, large parts of the country's north remain outside government control.
