Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika asked the army on Thursday to step up attacks on Islamist rebels, saying they were ”enemies of the people”.
”As armed forces commander in chief, I want the fight against residual terrorism doubled in intensity,” the official APS news agency quoted him as saying in a speech to army commanders on Independence Day.
”The recent criminal attacks in Algiers and elsewhere are a reminder of the absolute necessity never to let our guard down,” he added, in a rare reference by the head of state to triple suicide bombings that killed 33 on April 11 in Algiers.
An al-Qaeda-aligned rebel group previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) claimed responsibility for that attack.
Up to 200 000 people have been killed in political bloodshed since 1992 when supporters of a now-outlawed Muslim fundamentalist party that was poised to win elections that year subsequently launched an armed rebellion against the state.
The violence has subsided in recent years amid successive government offers of amnesty to the rebels, but sputters on mainly in countryside east of Algiers.
Bouteflika added: ”This peace should be consoldiated and to do that we should first relentlessly pursue the fight against the terrorist and criminal ventures of those who, refusing the magnanimous call of the nation, declare thesmelves enemies of the people.”
In the latest incident, a bomb exploded on Thursday near a car carrying the governor of the restive Tizi Ouzou region, in the first apparent assassination attempt in years against a top local government official, residents said.
A policeman was wounded but the governor, or wali, Hocine Mazouz, was unharmed when the device went off beside a road in Ain al-Hamam village seconds after his car passed by, they said. – Reuters 2007