Bombs in Algeria- Al-Qaeda

**alexjc** · Dec 11th, 2007, 8:36 am

"A total of 13 United Nations staff and a number of schoolchildren were believed to be among 67 people slaughtered today in two huge car bomb attacks blamed on al-Qaeda affliated militants in the Algerian capital.

A pair of blasts occurred within minutes of each other in Algiers, the first destroying a school bus outside the Constitutional Court building and the second detonating outside United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in the suburb of Hydra.

A group calling itself the al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb has been blamed for the attacks, the deadliest so far of a series of bombings in the last few months.

The targeting of the UN will raise fears that the group is planning to internationalise its campaign and begin to target European, and in particular French, targets as Algerian terror groups did in the 1990s.

Jean Fabre, of the UN Development Programme, said that the bombing outside the UNHCR offices had killed 10 staff members. However, a total of 13 are missing after the attacks.

Massive damage was reported to UN buildings in the Hydra area after the blast.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, condemned the attacks while on a trip to Indonesia, telling journalists: "This is just unacceptable. I would like to condemn it in the strongest terms. It cannot be justified in any circumstances."

Yazid Zerhouni, the Algerian Interior Minister, said that the bomb outside the UN office was likely to have been a suicide attack, while the other blast was not. They were just minutes apart. "The death toll is very high," he said. "

This exert was taken from an article on Times Online.

I chose not to use the BBC News article as they take out very important part of the events to remain astonishingly PC to the point of ridicule. :sshocked: