Algeria: Police targeted in bomb attacks

An apparently co-ordinated wave of bombings largely targeting police killed six people and injured nearly 30 others in Algeria today, according to the official news agency, police and hospital staff.

While no one claimed responsibility for the attacks, they bore hallmarks of the Salafist Group of Call and Combat, or GSPC, an al-Qaida-linked Islamic insurgency group.

The seven bombings tore through towns and countryside east of Algiers between 4am and 10am Irish time, the APS agency said.

The near-simultaneous attacks surprised the North African country, which has steadily emerged from an Islamic insurgency that killed more than 150,000 during the 1990s.

Some of the attacks were car bombings, APS said. Two of the dead were police officers, it said.

The agency also reported 13 injured, and said 10 of them were police. Medical officials and police said 29 people were wounded.

“I was woken by a terrific crash that shattered the windows of my house,” said Yassine, who lives near a police station that was targeted in the town of Boumerdes.