Twin car bombs rocked a hotel and military headquarters in Algeria, killing 12 people Wednesday, a day after a suicide bombing nearby killed 43. The new bombings were the sixth major terrorist action this month in the North African nation.
No group has claimed responsibility for the recent spate of killings, including the two remote-controlled car bombs that struck the city of Bouira on Wednesday. But all six occurred in an area east of the capital where militants from an Algerian offshoot of al-Qaida are suspected to operate.
Violence in this gas- and oil-rich U.S. ally has surged since the GSPC — a homegrown extremist group that led a deadly insurgency in the 1990s — joined Osama bin Laden's network in 2006 and took the name Al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa.
The death toll surged to more than 70 this month alone, and the relentless bombings led many newspapers to question whether authorities have grown too lenient, or too weak, to fight Islamist extremists.
Jean-Louis Bruguiere, a terrorism expert, says the group is receiving military reinforcements from al-Qaida in Iraq — and using Algeria as a platform to spread instability throughout North Africa and possibly beyond.
The security situation is deteriorating, and it's worrisome for Europe, said Bruguiere, formerly France's top counterterrorism judge and now the European Union coordinator of a terrorism finance tracking program jointly run with the United States.
Interior Minister Yazid Zehrouni, however, insisted the string of attacks suggest that extremist groups are cornered by Algerian security services and riddled with internal problems and are mainly aiming to raise internal troop morale.
Wednesday's two car bombs in Bouira, some 55 miles southeast of the capital, were triggered by remote control, the first hitting a regional military command and injuring four soldiers, the state-run APS news agency reported.
A minute later, at least 12 people died and 27 were wounded when a second bomb exploded next to a nearby downtown hotel. Most of the victims were traveling in a bus that passed in front of the hotel, APS said.
All those who died and about 15 of the wounded were Algerian employees SNC Lavalin, a Montreal-based engineering and construction firm, the company said in a statement. They were on the bus headed to work on a water treatment plant and distribution project.
The military barracks were severely damaged. Parts of the walls have fallen off, the fence is destroyed, cars are buried under the rubble, Abdellah Debbache, the Bouira correspondent of Algeria's Liberte newspaper, told The Associated Press by telephone.
A day earlier, a suicide bombing some 28 miles away in Les Issers killed 43 people in Algeria's biggest attack since the 1990s. The bomber targeted young students lined up to apply at a police academy, and at least 45 were injured.
Terrorism: is the State powerless? questioned a large headline on the cover of the independent newspaper El Watan, which carried a single, large photograph of the bloodbath. It also reported that another road bombing Tuesday targeted a convoy of workers from a Japanese construction company working on a highway near Constantine in eastern Algeria, injuring one police escort.
Several Algerian newspapers questioned whether a national reconciliation policy voted in 2005 to grant widespread amnesty to Islamists was giving radical groups too much space to regroup and find new support.
Algeria's insurgency broke out in 1992 when the secular-leaning army canceled legislative elections that an Islamist party was expected to win. It claimed up to 200,000 lives. The insurgency largely died out before militants got a new boost by joining forces with al-Qaida.
Today, extremists focus their efforts against security forces and foreigners.
On Sunday, extremists ambushed and then beheaded 12 people, including 11 security officials in Skikda in eastern Algeria. A soldier and the leader of the nearby military region of Jijel were killed on Aug. 14; and a suicide bombing four days earlier killed eight people at a police station in Zemmouri next to Algiers. Before that, another suicide bombing wounded 25 on Aug. 3.
Smaller-scale ambushes and bombings, usually against police, have also taken place on a regular basis.
The GSPC's original founder issued a condemnation of Tuesday's attacks. Quit all subversive action, said Hassan Hattab in remarks published in several newspapers, calling the armed insurgency a dead end. Hattab, who has been dismissed by the more militant members of the GSPC, lives in an undisclosed location. The authenticity of his statement could not be independently verified.
Most of the violence has occurred in the hilly coastal area dubbed the deadly rectangle that extends from the capital to Bourmerdes, Bouira and Tizi-Ouzou and where Abdelmalek Droukdal, the head of Algeria's al-Qaida offshoot, is thought to be hiding.
The capital itself, protected by several rings of police and army checkpoints, has been spared since December 2007 when bombings at U.N. offices and a government building killed 41 people, including 17 U.N. workers.
But it's heating up, people are starting to get really worried, said Omar, a newspaper vendor in Algiers who said he'd sold out on most dailies by midmorning Wednesday. He declined to give his last name because Algerians are often wary of media attention given the tense situation in their country.
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Associated Press Writer Aomar Ouali contributed to this report.
