Algeria bombing kills 43

ALGIERS: A bomb attack east of Algiers on Tuesday killed 43 people and wounded 38, the Algerian interior ministry said, in one of the bloodiest incidents in years in the OPEC member state.

A ministry statement carried by the official APS news agency, said the attack targeted a paramilitary gendarmerie training school at Issers, 55 km (34 miles) east of the capital.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack.

In recent months the mountainous region east of Algiers has seen numerous attacks by al Qaeda's north Africa wing, which is fighting to set up purist Islamic rule in the north African country, a major oil and gas supplier to Europe.

A suicide car bombing killed at least six civilians in Zemmouri, also east of Algiers, on Aug 10 in an attack on a coast guard barracks and an adjacent post of the gendarmerie.

The government said the attack may have been retaliation for an army ambush that killed 12 rebels in mountainous Kabylie region during the night of August 7 to 8.

Newspapers have said that ambush was part of the army's pursuit of rebels who orchestrated a suicide car bombing which wounded 25 people in Tizi Ouzou town east of Algiers on August 3.

That attack was claimed by al Qaeda's north Africa wing, the al Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Saturday's attack.

The group has links with like-minded militants in other north African countries and is the most effective armed rebel organization in the country of 34 million, Africa's second largest country by area.

The group has claimed several attacks in the past including the twin suicide bombings of U.N. offices and a court building in Algiers in December 2007, which killed 41 people, 17 of them United Nations staff.

Algeria, an important supplier of gas to Europe, is emerging from more than a decade of conflict that began when in 1992 the military-backed government scrapped legislative elections a radical Islamic party was poised to win.

About 150,000 people have died during the ensuing violence.

The bloodshed has subsided in recent years and in 2006 the government freed more than 2,000 former Islamist guerrillas under an amnesty designed to put an end to the conflict.

But a hard core of several hundred rebels fights on as members of al Qaeda's north Africa wing, which was previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat or GSPC.

The group's leader, Abdelmalek Droukdel, told the New York Times last month that increasing numbers of young men around the region were joining the group out of persistent poverty and anger at what he called the West's war on Islam.