ALGERIA: A bomb attack east of Algiers killed 43 people and wounded 38 yesterday, the Algerian interior ministry said, in one of the bloodiest incidents in years in the Opec member state.
A ministry statement carried by the APS news agency said the attack targeted a paramilitary gendarmerie training school at Issers, 55km (34 miles) east of the capital. The bombing follows several recent attacks by al-Qaeda's north African wing, but there was no immediate claim of responsibility.
The local al-Qaeda affiliate has claimed several attacks in the past, including the twin suicide bombings of UN offices and a court building in Algiers in December 2007, which killed 41 people, 17 of them United Nations staff.
Witnesses said yesterday's attack was carried out by a suicide bomber who rammed his car into a group of prospective recruits, aged 18 to 20, lining up to get into the school for qualifying exams.
Many Algerian youths see military jobs as an opportunity for a better future amid fierce competition for their hearts and minds between the country's military and radical Islamists, analysts say.
In recent months, the mountainous areas east of Algiers have seen numerous attacks by al-Qaeda's north Africa wing, which is fighting to set up purist Islamic rule in Algeria, a major oil and gas supplier to Europe.
The group has links with like-minded militants in other Maghreb countries and is the most effective rebel group in the country of 34 million.
Algerian papers said rebels linked to al-Qaeda had killed eight policemen, three soldiers and a civilian in successive ambushes in eastern Algeria on Sunday. El Watan said victims of the first ambush were shot dead and then their throats slit.
A suicide car bombing killed at least six civilians in Zemmouri, east of Algiers, on August 10th, in an attack on a coast guard barracks and an adjacent gendarmerie. The government said the attack may have been retaliation for an army ambush that killed 12 rebels on August 7th.
Conflict began in Algeria in 1992 when a military-backed government scrapped legislative elections a radical Islamic party was poised to win. About 150,000 people have died in violence since.
The bloodshed has subsided in recent years and, in 2006, the government freed more than 2,000 former Islamist guerrillas. But a hard core of several hundred rebels fights on as members of al-Qaeda's local wing, previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat.
The group's leader, Abdelmalek Droukdel, told the New York Timeslast month young men were joining the group, angry at what he called the West's war on Islam.
- (Reuters)