Police targeted by suicide attacker
Source: Agencies |
August 15, 2011, Monday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
A SUICIDE bomber crashed a small truck laden with explosives into a police station in the capital of the Kabylie region east of Algiers early yesterday, injuring at least 29 people.
The official APS news agency, citing security officials, said 15 officers and 14 civilians were injured when the vehicle crashed into the main entrance of the Tizi Ouzou police station at 4am.
The local hospital treating victims put the number at 33, most with minor injuries. Many lived near the police station.
Debris from the bomber's truck, was flung hundreds of meters, police said. A doctor living nearby, Alliche Brahim, said the blast awoke everyone in the town, 100 kilometers east of Algiers.
A building from which numerous newspapers operate was among those damaged, with its door ripped off and windows broken. The hospital where the injured were treated was also damaged.
Algerian police chief General Abdelghani Hammel traveled to Tizi Ouzou to visit the police station and hospital, and meet the region's security commission.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Kabylie, the Berber capital, is a stronghold of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.
A police station across town was attacked by a suicide bomber in August 2008. Two officers were killed.
This verdant region of mountains and valleys has become the base for the al-Qaida affiliate that sprang from an Algerian insurgency movement in late 2006.
Islamist extremists have battled Algerian security forces since 1992, when the army canceled a national election that a now-banned Muslim fundamentalist party was poised to win.
The official APS news agency, citing security officials, said 15 officers and 14 civilians were injured when the vehicle crashed into the main entrance of the Tizi Ouzou police station at 4am.
The local hospital treating victims put the number at 33, most with minor injuries. Many lived near the police station.
Debris from the bomber's truck, was flung hundreds of meters, police said. A doctor living nearby, Alliche Brahim, said the blast awoke everyone in the town, 100 kilometers east of Algiers.
A building from which numerous newspapers operate was among those damaged, with its door ripped off and windows broken. The hospital where the injured were treated was also damaged.
Algerian police chief General Abdelghani Hammel traveled to Tizi Ouzou to visit the police station and hospital, and meet the region's security commission.
No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Kabylie, the Berber capital, is a stronghold of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.
A police station across town was attacked by a suicide bomber in August 2008. Two officers were killed.
This verdant region of mountains and valleys has become the base for the al-Qaida affiliate that sprang from an Algerian insurgency movement in late 2006.
Islamist extremists have battled Algerian security forces since 1992, when the army canceled a national election that a now-banned Muslim fundamentalist party was poised to win.
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