ISSERS, Algeria: A suicide attacker yesterday killed 43 people and wounded dozens waiting outside an elite police school in Algeria.
Al-Qaeda has claimed previous attacks in Algeria but officials gave no indication who was behind the strike on candidates waiting to take an examination at Issers, 60 km east of Algiers.
The Interior Ministry said the dead included 42 civilians and one police officer, and added that 32 of the 45 wounded were civilians.
It was the deadliest attack this year in Algeria and worse than the December 2007 attacks in Algiers against government and United Nations buildings, which killed 41 people and injured dozens.
Witnesses said the attacker drove a car packed with explosives at the main entrance to the school as university graduates waited outside for the start of an entry exam in the hope of joining the paramilitary gendarmerie.
“It’s utter carnage,” said the elderly father of one of those killed in the attack. “It’s a catastrophe,” he said, weeping. “May God punish them for the crime they have committed against these youngsters and their country.”
Another candidate survived because he went to buy cigarettes but his father, mother and brother were killed in the blast, witnesses said.
As well as devastating the entrance to the school, the blast destroyed several nearby houses, blew out windows in nearby shops and uprooted trees. The explosion left a crater several meters wide.
Recent attacks have ended a six-month period of relative calm that followed the devastating December bombings in Algiers and a subsequent security clampdown.
Between January and July, Algerian courts handed down 218 death sentences in absentia to armed rebels, according to judicial sources.
The increase in attacks has been explained by analysts in the Algerian press as a bid by the leaders of extremist groups to break out of their normal area of operation.
That zone, the so-called “quadrangle of death,” covers the capital Algiers and the cities of Boumerdes, Bouira and Tizi Ouzo to the east and southeast.
