11 August 2008

A suicide bomber rammed a van full of explosives into a police post in eastern Algeria, killing eight people and wounding 19 others, public radio reported on Sunday. The attack happened at about 10 p.m. Saturday at Zemmouri al-Bahri, a popular beach with holidaymakers near Boumerdes, east of Algiers. Some reports also said only six civilians had died in the bombing.

Local people said gendarmes opened fire on the bomber when he refused to stop his vehicle, and he shouted "God is Great" seconds before detonating the bomb. The radio said the bomber's targets were a coastguard barracks and an adjacent post of the paramilitary gendarmerie. Witnesses said the gendarmerie post was destroyed but the barracks were only slightly damaged.

It came less than one week after a suicide attack on a police station at Tizi Ouzou, in the eastern Kabylie region, which wounded 25 people.

Responsibility for the August 3 attack was claimed by Al-Qaeda's North African branch.

The group also claimed an attack on July 23, in which police said a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up and wounded 13 Algerian soldiers in Lakhdaria, also east of Algiers.

This weekend's latest, deadly blast represents the heaviest toll since two suicide blasts on United Nations buildings in Algiers in December that killed at least 41 people, including 18 UN staffers.

Armed groups in Boumerdes, neighboring the mountainous wooded region of Kabylie, remain the most active in Algeria. Unofficial sources estimate there are 300 to 400 armed militants in this area, dubbed the "quadrangle of death."

Saturday night's attack came three weeks before the beginning of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, considered a peak period for "jihad" or holy war.

Anti-terrorism experts say Algiers, which has been placed under heavy security surveillance, remains the main target of armed groups and that several attacks have been intercepted here.

The recent spate of violence brought to an end a six-month period of relative calm that followed the devastating December bombings.

That attack triggered the reinforcement of anti-terrorism and security measures around public buildings, as well as an attempt to clamp down on terrorist networks.

Between January and July, Algerian courts handed down 218 death sentences in absentia to armed Islamists on the run, according to judicial sources.

Twelve armed Islamists, including a number of individuals considered among the leaders of Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, were killed overnight Thursday into Friday by the army in an ambush near Beni Douala, near Tizi Ouzou, the Interior Ministry said.

Security forces discovered a minor arsenal of weapons including Kalashnikov assault rifles, as well as mobile telephones, the ministry added.

Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni told state radio that Saturday's bomber used between 200 and 300 kilograms of explosives and that the attack appeared to be retaliation for the army ambush days earlier.

The leader of Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, Abdelmalek Droukdel, told the New York Times last month that increasing numbers of young men around the region were joining the group because of persistent poverty and anger at what he called the West's war on Islam. - AFP, Reuters

Copyright The Daily Star 2008.