Algiers agitated

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TWO bomb attacks rocked the Algerian capital, Algiers, on Tuesday killing at least 62 people and some 100 injured with foreigners among the casualties. Ten of those killed were Algerian UN employees.

Al-Qaeda's Maghreb branch claimed responsibility for the blasts. One bomb tore apart the front of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) building. A second blew apart a bus packed with university students outside the Supreme Court.

Algeria's Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni said a suicide bomber triggered the explosion outside the Algiers office of the UNHCR. The front of the red brick building was badly damaged and the UNHCR said staff were among the casualties. In the second near-simultaneous attack, a car bomb was detonated outside the Supreme Court as a bus packed with university students passed by, heading for a nearby law faculty. Security sources said the bus took the full force of the blast and most of the dead and injured there were students.

Algeria has been hit by a number of bomb attacks this year -- in which scores of people have been killed -- and most have been claimed by Al-Qaeda.

There has however been a relative lull in Islamist-inspired violence since September. The four dead recorded in an AFP toll for November was the lowest monthly figure since Algeria's Islamist strife erupted in 1992. In September, a suicide attack targeting President Abdul-Aziz Bouteflika's convoy in the eastern town of Batna killed 22 people and wounded more than 100 others. Two days later, another suicide attack against a coastguard barracks at Dellys, east of Algiers, left 30 people dead and 40 wounded. Two weeks later, a suicide bomber rammed a booby-trapped car into a convoy east of Algiers, wounding two French engineers and an Italian, in an attack only hours after Al-Qaeda called for an offensive against French targets.

In July, 10 soldiers were killed and 35 people wounded when a suicide bomber rammed a truck full of explosives into barracks in Lakhdaria, an Islamist stronghold.

In April, car bomb attacks on the government headquarters and a police station in Algiers killed 33 people and injured more than 220. In February, seven simultaneous bomb attacks killed six people in the Kabylie region.

All the attacks were claimed by Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, the new name for the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which has pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and has started using Al-Qaeda's suicide bomber tactics.

In October, Algeria's army chief-of-staff, General Salah Gaid, called for a crackdown on the militants, and police have started using more road blocks in major cities and a greater use of informers in a bid to single out potential suicide bombers and their backers.

photo: AP