REGHAIA, Algeria, 29 May 2003 — Northern Algeria was rocked early yesterday by the second strong aftershock in the space of 12 hours, following last week’s deadly earthquake that killed at least 2,200 people. The latest shock hit near the capital Algiers at 7:57 a.m. (0657 GMT), with local seismologists recording the intensity at 5.2 points on the open-ended Richter scale.

Radio stations broadcast appeals from experts calling on people not to panic but also warning them to expect further aftershocks. The epicenter of yesterday morning’s tremor was in Zemmoria, a region already hard-hit by last week’s massive earthquake and located some 70 kilometers east of the capital Algiers, state radio said.

On Tuesday night, a major aftershock caused more buildings to collapse. Some 330 were lightly injured as they fled in panic in after the tremor. The shock, whose epicenter was also in the Zemmoria region, measured 5.8 points on the Richter scale.

Most local people in Algiers appeared to react calmly to yesterday morning’s aftershock, which came as the morning rush hour was building up and people were on the way to work. There had been scenes of panic 12 hours earlier when the first of the major aftershocks was felt.

Two people who had been trapped Tuesday evening when a 15-storey apartment block collapsed in the town of Reghaia, east of Algiers, were yesterday brought out alive, rescuers told AFP. They, like many others, had ignored official advice and gone back into the building, which had been leaning to one side since last week’s tremor, to get their belongings. It was still unclear yesterday how many people were caught in the block.

Staff at the Algerian Centre for Research in Astrophysics, Astronomy and Geophysics (CRAAG) said that the aftershocks were a normal consequence of the original tremor. Thousands of people have been made homeless by last week’s quake, the worst the North African country had suffered in 23 years. As many as 100,000 people have been living outside for the past week, due to fears that buildings might collapse.

Algerians had thought they were finished with shock and had moved on to dealing with their grief. These emotions for many have turned into a bitter rage over the heavy loss of life, blamed on corrupt property developers dubbed “merchants of death” exacerbated by a chaotic initial response to the crisis. Hundreds are assumed to have perished as emergency services turned up late or not at all. Many were trapped in buildings that had clearly not been quake-proofed, in violation of regulations on the books since 1980 when Algeria’s worst quake struck, killing some 3,000. “It’s the builders who killed people, not the earthquake,” said the uncle of 8-year-old Hassiba Yazi, who was rescued from the rubble of an apartment building erected when she was five.

At a tent camp where some of Hassiba’s former neighbors are sheltering, the trauma of May 21 was evident in the drawings of children newly homeless or orphaned or both — mainly of nice houses in the countryside that they remember from summer camp. Many Algerians are resigned to a fate that has dealt them natural calamities like earthquakes and floods on top of a brutal civil war.

Huge piles of rubble and twisted metal were all that remained of a 15-storey building in the eastern coastal town of Reghaia, where rescue workers said three men had become trapped on Tuesday as they tried to recover belongings. Shock and grief gave way to anger at the weekend as Algerians turned on their government, accusing it of doing little to help the homeless and of turning a blind eye to the corner-cutting of unscrupulous builders in a quake-prone area.