A truck bomb went off at an Algerian army barracks on Wednesday, killing eight troops in an attack claimed by al Qaeda's north Africa wing. The attack in Lakhdaria village 120 km east of the capital in the Kabylie region reported hours before the opening in Algiers of the All Africa Games.
The 0530 GMT blast was caused by a truck bomb and the eight dead and 23 injured were soldiers, the official APS news agency reported security sources as saying. Residents, citing unconfirmed reports, said the assault was carried out by a suicide bomber.
Al Jazeera television said al Qaeda's north Africa wing, the al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb, claimed responsibility for the attack and said it was a suicide mission. "Our martyr was able to enter into the heart of the (barracks) and set off the explosion there," said a spokesman of al Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb in an audio tape.
The spokesman named the suicide attacker as Suhail Abu Malih and said more than one ton of explosives were used.
Algeria's Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni declared in Algiers that the fight against the armed groups "will continue with the same determination" and that measures have been taken to reinforce counterterrorism. Talking on the sidelines of the People's National Assembly (Parliament) works in response to the attack, Zerhouni said that it "was not ruled out that armed groups would commit such kind of attacks,” underlying that these latter "will never undermine the determination of security services to fight these groups.”
