Algiers | Wednesday
A POWERFUL bomb blast wounded 29 people, four seriously, early on Tuesday at a bus station crowded with students in the Algerian capital, medical sources and witnesses said.
The attack, using a homemade bomb which was concealed in a briefcase, came on the fourth day of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, as Algiers was still reeling from storms and floods which killed more than 700 people.
Some victims had their legs and feet blown off when the blast ripped through the Tafourah bus station, packed with students who were waiting to be taken to university, at 8:45 am (0745 GMT).
The security forces were still much in demand elsewhere, in the wake of the devastating floods and mudslides which killed 735 people in the north of the country, including 685 in Algiers’ Bab El Oued district, according to the latest official toll on Tuesday.
A doctor at the Mustapha Bacha hospital said on state television that most of those wounded by the blast, including two of the four who were seriously hurt, were students. The other injured people had left the hospital after treatment, he said.
Witnesses described how some students were sobbing after the blast, while others walked in a daze around the bus station in the city centre, a base for services to the suburbs where university campuses are based.
A recently captured member of the fundamentalist Armed Islamic Group (GIA) has said that the movement has infiltrated Algiers to carry out such attacks during Ramadan, sources close to the police said.
The GIA, one of two radical movements at war with the secular government, had been expected to manifest its presence in the capital, but did not have the capacity for damage it had shown between 1993 and 1998, the sources added.
Muslim fundamentalists consider Ramadan an auspicious month for their “jihad” or “holy war” against the impious authorities.
Bomb attacks or guerrilla raids in Algiers and its near suburbs began again three months ago after a calm spell almost two years long. On August 29, two people were killed and 32 injured in an attack on the Casbah, or old town.
Tuesday’s attack spread caused panic and fear in a city which has scarcely begun to recover from the storms which caused piles of mud and rubble to crash down on the working-class district of Bab El Oued on November 10.
Algerian authorities have been defending themselves against charges that the catastrophe claimed so many lives because they had blocked up the drains in 1997 to stop the GIA using them to flee through the sewers after carrying out attacks.
Residents of Bab El Oued, where officials said about 170 people were still missing as rescue workers pursued a desperate search, say the authorities filled drains with concrete after discovering explosives, electronic devices, blankets and medicines.
But officials on Tuesday showed AFP the sewage system on the high ground above Bab El Oued, where a broad stream of muddy water was still pouring down the four by 3.5 metre final tunnel into the Mediterranean.
The violence of the floodwaters had torn away a metal grid which was put in with the sewage system itself to stop large waste items going into the sea.
Officials said they had in 1977 sealed manholes to prevent Muslim fundamentalists from using them as escape routes, but denied blocking the flow of water in the sewers.
A German expert who works for the Algiers urban water supply service said that the disaster occurred because the sewers simply lacked the capacity to handle such storms, which produced a water-flow 10 times what could be catered for.
“The catastrophe could have been foreseen from the moment no further drainage was provided during the anarchic process of urbanisation on the hills overlooking Bab El Oued,” the expert said. – AFP