Suspicions quickly focused on the North African wing of al-Qaida. The date the 11th could point to an Islamic terror link. Al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa claimed responsibility for attacks on April 11 that hit the prime minister's office and a police station, killing 33 people.
Jean Fabre of the U.N. Development Program in Geneva initially said 10 staff members were killed, but later said 12 were missing.
``We are looking through the rubble for people,'' Fabre said after speaking with Marc Destanne De Bernis, the agency's top official in the Algerian capital. ``He doesn't know the counts of death. He knows that there are about 12 people missing, of which he has no news.''
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon strongly condemned the bombings.
``This is just unacceptable,'' said a somber Ban, who was on Indonesia's resort island of Bali for a U.N. climate conference. ``I would like to condemn it in the strongest terms. It cannot be justified in any circumstances.''
The Bush administration added its denunciation.
``We condemn this attack on the United Nations office by these enemies of humanity who attack the innocent. The United States stands with the people of Algeria, as well as the United Nations as they deal with this senseless violence,'' said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
The bombs exploded around 9:30 a.m. (3:30 a.m. EST) and blew off the front off the U.N. refugee agency building, said UNHCR chief spokesman Ron Redmond. It apparently caused even worse damage to the main U.N. building housing the U.N. Development Program and other agencies across the street.
``We can't even say for certain that the U.N. was being targeted but one can certainly start to draw that conclusion since this explosion took place in a very narrow street right between two UN buildings,'' Redmond told CNN.
He added that one UNHCR staff member was killed.
The U.N. offices are in the upscale Hydra neighborhood of Algiers, which houses many foreign embassies and has a substantial foreign population.
At least 15 people were killed in the Hydra attack, said a national official at the civil protection agency who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. The other attack, which killed at least 30 people, was in the Ben Aknoun neighborhood of Algiers, where the Constitutional Council is located, the official said.
Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni said the Constitutional Council, which oversees elections, was the other target, adding that the attacks appeared to have been caused by car bombs.
``An attack like this is among the easiest actions to carry out. I have always said that we are not safe from these sorts of attacks,'' he told reporters in remarks carried by the official APS news agency.
``Everything depends on the degree of our vigilance and our degree of mobilization against this. You will have noticed that there are fewer and fewer attacks of this nature. That means that the groups carrying out these sorts of attacks are facing more and more problems.''
Public radio, Algiers Network 3, said the bombs went off about 10 minutes apart.
Some victims of one of the attacks had been riding a school bus, APS said.
``I was in my office and heard an explosion in the distance. When I went downstairs, I was hit by another explosion, just in front of our building,'' said an unidentified man swathed in bloody dressings who spoke from his hospital bed in footage shown on France-2.
TV video showed a badly damaged building with windows blown out, burned out cars in a street and a charred bus.
Tuesday's attack recalled the Aug. 19, 2003, attack on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad with a truck bomb that killed top U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 21 others.
Algeria has been battling Islamic insurgents since the early 1990s, when the army canceled the second round of the country's first multiparty elections, stepping in to prevent likely victory by an Islamic fundamentalist party.
Islamist armed groups then turned to force to overthrow the government, with up to 200,000 people killed in the ensuing violence.
The last year has seen a series of bombings against state targets, many of them suicide attacks.
Recent bombings have been claimed by al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa. That was the name adopted in January after the remnants of the insurgency, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, or GSPC, formally linked with al-Qaida.
Once focused on toppling the Algerian government, the group has now turned its sights on international holy war and the fight against Western interests. French counterterrorism officials say it is drawing members from across North Africa.
A Sept. 6 attack during President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's visit to the eastern city of Batna killed 22 people, and a suicide bombing two days later on a coast guard barracks in the town of Dellys left at least 28 dead.
Car Bomb (AP photo)
http://accesswdun.com/article/2007/12/204779