Twin blasts toll reaches 52
2007-12-11 14:49
Algiers - Two bomb attacks rocked the Algerian capital on Tuesday - one on the United Nations refugee agency - killing at least 52 people with foreigners among the casualties, say hospital sources and officials.
One bomb tore apart the front of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) building. A second blew apart a bus packed with university students outside the Supreme Court.
Algeria had been hit by a number of bomb attacks this year - in which scores of people had been killed - and most had been claimed by al-Qaeda.
Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni said a suicide bomber triggered the explosion outside the Algiers office of the UNHCR. The front of the red brick building was badly damaged and the UNHCR said staff were among the casualties.
'The death toll is very high'
In the second near-simultaneous attack, a car bomb was detonated outside the Supreme Court as a bus packed with university students passed by, heading for a nearby law faculty.
Security sources said the bus took the full force of the blast and most of the dead and injured there were students. The minister said: "The death toll is very high."
Hospital sources said 52 people were killed in the two attacks, but did not give a breakdown. They added that several foreigners were among the seriously injured.
The UNHCR office was in the Hydra residential district, where the finance and energy ministries and several diplomatic residences were also located.
There were "victims in the offices," said Jennifer Pagonis, said a UNHCR spokesperson at the agency headquarters in Geneva. She said no figures were available.
More than 100 people dead
Hydra was normally under tight police surveillance because of the number of foreigners who lived there. Ambulances with sirens wailing rushed to the two sites, where columns of black smoke rose from wreckage.
Security forces threw up roadblocks around the city and the interior minister spoke to reporters after visiting the scene. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blasts.
Al-Qaeda's offshoot in north Africa said it carried out a series of bomb attacks in Algiers and other parts of the country this year, which had left more than 100 dead.
However, there had been a relative calm in Islamist-inspired violence since September. More than 100 000 people died in Algeria during a civil war in the 1990s.
On September 06, a suicide attack targeting President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's convoy in the eastern town of Batna killed 22 people and wounded more than 100 others.
Two days later, another suicide attack against a coastguard barracks at Dellys, east of Algiers, left 30 people dead and 40 wounded.