Car bombs erupt in Algeria in a 2d deadly day; 11 killed

CAIRO - Car bombs struck near a hotel and a military compound in Algeria yesterday, killing at least 11 people and wounding 31 others, the Algerian Interior Ministry said. The two blasts followed by a day a deadly attack on prospective recruits at a police academy.

The car bombs detonated about 15 minutes apart starting around 6 a.m. in the town of Bouira.

The first injured four soldiers outside a regional military command center, according to the Algerian press agency. The second killed at least 11 people around the Sophie Hotel, which is reportedly used by employees of a Canadian construction company building a dam in eastern Algeria.

The state press agency said that most of those killed were on a bus passing the hotel on its way to the dam site. The agency did not list the nationalities of the victims.

The bloodshed followed Tuesday's bombing that left at least 43 people dead, most of them young men waiting to sign up for police entrance exams. A string of assaults over the last 18 months has conjured an eerie echo from the nation's civil war of a decade ago.

No group claimed responsibility for yesterday's explosions, but officials suspect they were orchestrated by the emboldened Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

The group has startled the country by changing the dynamics of resistance with an increasing reliance on suicide bombers attacking international targets and Algerian military and police compounds.

The members of the Al Qaeda-linked organization are holdovers from Islamic militias that battled the government from 1992 until 2002, when reconciliation and amnesty programs helped end a civil war that had killed an estimated 200,000 people.

"The terrorists have changed the strategy," Mahmoud Belhimeur, deputy editor of El Khabar daily, said in a telephone interview. "They're using tactics from Iraq and Afghanistan. They're using the Internet for recruiting and cellphones to explode bombs."

A journalist who asked not to be named said Algerians were frustrated at the government's inability to stop the attacks. The most recent violence occurred east of Algiers, in the Kabylia region, where security forces have been battling militants.

"People don't understand," said the journalist. "They're told by the government that a military crackdown is underway, yet they can't believe what they're seeing. They say reconciliation attempts have done nothing. They're scared that the war of the 1990s will come back."