Line Spacing Test
PARIS, April 11 — Two bombings in Algeria, one targeting the prime minister’s office in the country’s capital, killed at least 23 people today and injured 160, marking a sharp escalation in the Qaeda-linked violence that has been spreading across North Africa in recent months.
Al-Jazeera television reported that the Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb, North Africa’s most active terrorist group, called its bureau and claimed responsibility for both bombings.
“This is a crime, a cowardly act,” said Prime Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem, speaking on national radio shortly after the explosion outside his offices. “It can only be described as cowardice and betrayal at a time when the Algerian people are asking for national reconciliation and extend their hands, these criminal acts are taking place.”
The official news agency said that at least 23 people had been reported dead following the bombings.
Police officials said the attack at the government offices killed at least 12 people, Agence France Presse reported.
The second attack took place in a suburb east of the capital, where officials said suicide bombers driving two cars attacked a police station, killing 11 people, AFP reported.
The Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb is the name recently adopted by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which was created in 1998 as an offshoot of an earlier Islamist group that had been fighting the government in a decade-long civil war.
Its numbers had been seriously depleted by two government offers of amnesty and a subsequent manhunt by Algerian security forces after the second offer expired last year. But the group has undergone an apparent revival since its affiliation with Al Qaeda last year, drawing new members from across North Africa, terrorism experts in Europe and North Africa say.
Together with a resurgence of violence in Morocco and Tunisia, governments on both sides of the Mediterranean fear that the re-branded group is coalescing into a regional terror movement.
In February, the group detonated five powerful car bombs outside police stations in six towns east of the capital, Algiers, killing six people.
Those coordinated attacks alarmed officials because they involved more sophisticated remote detonation devices than had been used before.
The attacks today confirmed fears that that the violence would again enter the capital, which became a war zone during the country’s horrific civil war in the 1990s.
Residents today described the scene after the explosions. "At first I thought it was an earthquake," the Reuters news agency quoted lawyer Tahar bin Taleb as saying. “My wife called me a few moments later crying and shouting. I ran home to find all the mirrors and windows in the house were shattered.” Reuters said the explosion at the prime minister’s offices blew a hole in the six-story building, shattered windows and showered rubble onto surrounding cars.
