Dozens killed in Algerian police school suicide attack

Dozens killed in Algerian police school suicide attack
ISSERS, Algeria (AFP) - A suicide attack on a police school has killed 43 people and wounded 38, the interior ministry said Tuesday.An Al-Qaeda group has claimed previous suicide attacks in Algeria but officials gave no indication who was behind the attack on candidates waiting to take part in an examination at Issers, 60 kilometres (40 miles) east of Algiers.

The Interior Ministry stressed that the casualty toll was still provisional.

But it is already the deadliest attack this year in Algeria and worse than the December 2007 attacks in Algiers against government and United Nations buildings, which killed 41 people and injured many others.

Witnesses told AFP that the attacker drove a car packed with explosives at the main entrance to the school as candidates for an entry exam were waiting outside.

Civilians and police were among the victims and a major security operation was launched, they added.

The attack was just the latest in a series on security forces in recent weeks.

The surge in violence also comes in the run-up to the Ramadan, when Muslims observe a month of fasting and spiritual reflection. Ramadan is considered a peak period for "jihad" or holy war.

Tuesday's newspapers here 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 the Skikda region, also left about a dozen security officers wounded, the Quotidien d'Oran and Liberte newspapers said. Four Islamist militants were killed.

One soldier killed in the ambush was Lieutenant-Colonel Rahmouni Mohammed, 47, the papers said.

On Thursday last week (August 14) the military commander in the mountainous Jijel region, Abdelkader Yamani, was killed with his driver when a bomb blew up under their four-wheel-drive vehicle.

On August 9, a suicide bomber rammed a van full of explosives into a police post at the beach resort of Zemmouri el-Bahri, in eastern Algeria, killing eight people and injuring 19 others.

Less than a week earlier, on August 3, another suicide attack on a police at Tizi Ouzou, in the eastern Kabylie region wounded 25 people.

Responsibility for that attack was claimed by Al-Qaeda's North African branch.

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

These attacks ended a six-month period of relative calm that followed the devastating December bombings in Algiers.

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.