At least 43 young applicants killed and 38 wounded while waiting to enlist at police recruitment centre
Young men stand in front of a house destroyed in a car bomb attack near Algiers. Photograph: Mohamed Messara/EPA
At least 43 people were killed when a car laden with explosives rammed into a police academy in Algeria, the country's interior ministry said today.
The ministry said that a further 38 people were wounded in the attack, which happened early today, in the Issers district of Boumerdes, 35 miles east of the capital, Algiers.
The attack occurred as young applicants were in line, waiting to register at the local police academy. A security official described the incident as "a bloodbath".
No immediate claim for responsibility was reported, but Algeria has suffered regular attacks blamed on militants linked to al-Qaida.
In the past 18 months more than 200 people have been killed in Algeria in attacks claimed by or suspected to be the work of the group.
An al-Qaida car bomb killed 37 people at a coast guard barracks in the port of Dellys, east of Algiers, in September last year. Three months later two blasts killed at least 41 people, including 17 UN staff at UN offices in Algiers. Al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the attack.
The group has links with like-minded militants in other Maghreb countries and is the most effective rebel group in the country.
Conflict with Islamist rebels in Algeria began in 1992 when a military-backed government scrapped legislative elections that a radical Islamic party was poised to win.
The bloodshed has subsided in recent years and in 2006 the government freed more than 2,000 former Islamist guerrillas under an amnesty designed to put an end to the conflict.
But a hard core of several hundred rebels fights on as members of al-Qaida's north Africa wing.
The group's leader, Abdelmalek Droukdel, told the New York Times last month that increasing numbers of young men around the region were joining the group out of persistent poverty and anger at what he called the West's war on Islam
source: www.guardian.co.uk
----------------------------------------------------------------------
A suicide attack on an Algerian police school at Issers, 40 miles east of Algiers, has killed 43 people and injured 38, the interior ministry has said.
The attacker drove a car packed with explosives at the main entrance to the school as candidates for an entry exam were waiting outside, witnesses told the AFP news agency.
Civilians as well as police officers were among the victims and a major security operation was under way there, they said.
The casualty figures were still provisional, the ministry said in a statement.
But it is already the deadliest attack in the country in several months, worse than the December 2007 attack in Algiers against government and United Nations buildings, which killed 41 people and injured many others.
It comes as Algeria's newspapers reported an attack on Sunday in which Islamist extremists killed 11 members of the security forces and a civilian in an ambush in the east of the country.
That attack, in Skikda, was one of the deadliest in recent weeks and also left about a dozen security officers wounded, the newspapers Quotidien d'Oran and Liberte said.
The papers also reported that four Islamist militants were killed in the attack. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the ambush.
One bomb exploded as security forces in a convoy of three vehicles were on patrol in a mountainous area of the Skikda region.
A second bomb targeted soldiers who had come to back up the security forces engaged in fierce clashes with the insurgents.
One of the soldiers killed in the ambush was Lieutenant-Colonel Rahmouni Mohammed, 47, the papers said.
On Thursday, the military commander in the region, Abdelkader Yamani, was also caught up in an ambush in the same area.
The Islamist militants, chased by security forces in Kabylia, were trying to regroup in the nearby Skikda region, the newspapers said.
SOURCE: SKY NEWS
No comments:
Post a Comment