France on Al-Qaeda alert after Algeria attack
AFP ^ | 09/21/2007

ALGIERS - Al-Qaeda's branch in North Africa claimed responsibility Friday for a suicide bombing in Algeria that wounded two French people and one Italian, hours after it had threatened French targets in the region.

According to Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel, the group claimed to have "killed three foreigners", although Algerian security sources said only that the three were injured alongside six Algerians, five of them police.

The attack near Lakhdaria, about 75 kilometers (50 miles) southeast of Algiers, where the group has claimed previous strikes, came just hours after Al-Qaeda called for an offensive against French targets.

France said it had reinforced security at missions in all North African countries following the threats and the new attack. "We take these new threats very seriously," said foreign ministry spokesman Frederic Desagneaux in Paris.

Two French nationals were sent back from Algeria this week after an intelligence tip-off that they were to be kidnapped by extremists.

In the statement posted on the Internet and received by Al-Arabiya's office in Algiers, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb said one of its militants with the nom de guerre of Othman bin Jaafar carried out Friday's attack with a car laden with "more than 250 kilos (550 pounds) of explosives."

Scores have died in bomb attacks claimed by Al-Qaeda across Algeria this year. And on Thursday, Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a video message to calling for the "cleansing" of French and Spaniards from North Africa as a first step in restoring the Iberian peninsula to the Islamic world.

The two injured French, who worked for construction firm Razel, and the Italian were in a car being escorted by police when the explosive-laden vehicle slammed into their convoy, according to European diplomatic sources and witnesses.

It was not immediately known if the suicide bomber died.

The Italian was the most seriously injured among the casualties, according to diplomats in Algiers.

A spokesman for Razel, based outside Paris, said the two French men, the Italian and an Algierian driver injured in the attack had been taken to hospital in Algiers and were "out of danger."

Al-Qaeda has stepped up operations in North Africa through its Algerian offshoot, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which has been renamed Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb.

Earlier this week two French nationals working in Algiers flew home after Algerian intelligence agencies picked up reports of an alleged plot to abduct them involving an Al-Qaeda linked group, French sources said.

The two men worked for the airport management company Aeroports de Paris (ADP), and were told to return immediately after French intelligence received a tip-off from Algerian counterpart.

Algerian agents had specific information about "threats of an abduction" targeting the two airport employees from a "terrorist group linked to Al-Qaeda", said the source.

Lakhdaria is in an Islamist stronghold. In July, 10 soldiers were killed and 35 people wounded when a suicide bomber rammed a truck full of explosives into barracks in the city.

Algeria was hit by two deadly attacks at the start of the month, claimed by the regional Al-Qaeda branch, which killed more than 50 people and wounded more than 140 others.

On September 6, 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, involving a booby-trapped car, left 30 people dead and 40 wounded.

In April, car bomb attacks on the government headquarters and a police station in Algiers killed 33 people and injured more than 220.

During the civil war of the 1990s around 30 French citizens were assassinated by Islamist groups who ordered all foreigners to leave the country. More than 100,000 people died in the conflict.