Five held in France after UN attack

Five men suspected of helping the al-Qaida UN bombers who killed nearly 40 people last week were being held in France today.

The car bomb attack on UN offices in Algiers and another simultaneous one at a court complex in Algiers was one of the worst suffered by the organisation.

A police spokesman said the five men, who are suspected of providing support to al-Qaida, were captured in Paris and near the Normandy city of Rouen.

They are being held at the headquarters of the DST counter-intelligence service.

The operation was based on a request from an anti-terrorism judge who suspected the men of providing computers and phones to the Algerian terror group.

Police seized computers as they searched the men’s homes. The suspects were North African and French and the men, all in their 30s, had police records and had been under surveillance.

There was nothing to suggest the men arrested in France had any direct involvement in the suicide bombings, the police spokesman said, adding that they were not suspected of planning attacks in France.

Al Qaida in Islamic North Africa is the new incarnation of the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, or GSPC, Algeria’s last remaining insurgent group.

In recent years, Algeria appeared to have overcome its jihadist movement, which dates back to the early 1990s and was aimed at overthrowing the government and installing an Islamic state.

But the GSPC seems to have bounced back this year after re-branding itself as an al-Qaida affiliate.

A string of suicide attacks, a new tactic for Algeria’s militants, have copied bombings in Iraq.