Al-Qaeda’s North Africa wing said it was behind a blast at a police station in Algeria which authorities said killed two people, according to a statement posted on the internet on Wednesday.
Al-Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb said a lone suicide bomber drove a truck packed with 650kg of explosives that detonated at the police station in a town east of Algiers on Tuesday.
”This proved the failure of the futile military and political attempts of the apostates and their Crusader masters to stop such blessed [suicide] operations,” the statement said.
The attack, which also wounded 23 people, followed a January 2 suicide bombing that killed four policemen, and twin bombings in the capital of the Opec member on December 11 that killed at least 41 people including 17 United Nations staff.
Al-Qaeda’s north African wing also claimed those attacks.
Algeria suffered more than a decade of violence that began in 1992 when the then army-backed government scrapped legislative elections that a radical Islamic party was poised to win. The authorities had feared an Islamic revolution.
Up to 200 000 people are estimated to have been killed.
Violence in the gas-exporting nation has fallen since then, but in the past 12 months it has regained a little of its former intensity, particularly in the mountainous Kabylie region.
Algerian Islamist rebels aligned themselves with al-Qaeda last year and began copying its tactics by carrying out a string of high-profile urban suicide bombings. – Reuters