'Al-Qaida' bomb kills 24 in Algeria

Al-Qaida’s new wing in North Africa claimed responsibility for co-ordinated suicide bombings that ripped through the prime minister’s office and a police station in Algeria, killing at least 24 people.

Yesterday’s attacks – which also wounded 222 people – were a devastating setback to the country’s peace efforts and highlighted the menacing spread of Islamic militancy across North Africa.

One car bombing tore holes in the walls of the premier’s office, where people in bloodstained clothes stumbled toward ambulances. Two other vehicles exploded outside a police station east of the capital, blasting craters into the ground and damaging the building.

The group that claimed responsibility, al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa, has carried out a series of recent bombings, jeopardising Algeria’s tentative peace. The country has been trying to turn the page on a 15-year Islamic insurgency that killed 200,000 people.

Until recently, the peace efforts seemed successful: Military crackdowns and amnesty offers had turned Algeria’s fighters into a ragtag assembly of fighters in rural hide-outs.

But late last year, the main Algerian militant group, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, changed its name to al Qaida in Islamic North Africa and began targeting foreigners – signs the country’s dwindling ranks of Islamic fighters were regrouping.

The attacks were the deadliest to hit the Algiers region since 2002, when a bomb in a market in a suburb killed 38 people and injured 80. The targeting of the premier’s office was among the most brazen in Algerian history.

Of the injured, 57 were being kept in hospitals overnight, while the rest were treated and released, the Interior Ministry said.

Yesterday’s attacks fell on April 11, which has potentially symbolic meaning. Attacks on the 11th day of the month are a hallmark of attacks led by al-Qaida and its admirers.

Prime Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem – who was not in his office when the attack occurred – called the bombings a “cowardly, criminal terrorist act” as he spoke outside the wrecked building. Parts of six floors were ripped away, and the iron gates outside were bent by the blast’s force.

He said legislative elections would proceed as planned on May 17.

The Algerian government did not name suspects. But Al-Jazeera television reported that it received a call from a spokesman for al Qaida’s North Africa wing saying the blasts were set off by three suicide bombers in vehicles packed with explosives.