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ALGIERS (Reuters) – Bombs killed 30 people in Algeria’s capital, attacks claimed by al Qaeda that raised fears the north African oil exporter was slipping back into the intense political violence of the 1990s.
One of the blasts, said by witnesses to be a suicide bomb, ripped part of the facade off the prime minister’s headquarters in the centre of Algiers. A second bomb hit Bab Ezzouar on its eastern outskirts, the official APS news agency said.
The Al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb claimed responsibility for the Algiers bombing in an Internet statement and said 45 people had been killed.
The claim could not immediately be verified but the group, formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has taken responsibility for a number of deadly attacks on security forces and foreigners in Algeria since January.
Newspaper editor Mounir Boudjema said the prime minister’s office was hit because it was Algeria’s “World Trade Center” — a prestige target such as the New York buildings hit in 2001.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon strongly condemned what he called the deplorable “terrorist” bombings in Algeria.
Hospital sources put the toll from the two bombings at 30. APS put the toll at 24 dead with 222 wounded.
CASABLANCA, Morocco (AP) — Three suspected terrorists blew themselves up as police were closing in, and another suspect was shot dead by police while he was preparing to detonate his explosives, authorities said.
A police officer was killed and another was injured. A young child also was injured, officials said.
The explosions in Casablanca, weeks after the bombing of an Internet cafe in the city, promised to further rattle the North African kingdom whose first high-profile brush with Islamic terrorism came in five suicide bombings in the city in May 2003.
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Tuesday’s violence started when police, acting on a tip, surrounded a four-story apartment building in the working-class Hay Farah neighborhood of Casablanca where the suspected terrorists were holed up, officials said.
The suspects were thought to have links to last month’s cyber cafe bombing.
One of the bombers who killed himself, Ayyoub Raydi, was the brother of the cafe bomber, Abdelfettah Raydi, an Interior Ministry official said. The official asked that he not be named, citing ministry policy.
After police surrounded the building before dawn Tuesday, one of the suspects fled to the roof, where he blew himself up, said a police official on the scene who refused to give his name, saying he was not authorized to do so. Morocco’s official MAP news agency identified that bomber as Mohamed Rachidi.
A second man appeared to be on the verge of also detonating explosives, fumbling with his clothes, when a police sniper shot him, officials said. The suspect later died of his wounds. He was identified by police as Mohamed Mentala. Mentala was carrying 4 kilograms (nearly 9 pounds) of explosives, the Interior Ministry official said.
Mentala and Rachidi had been sought by police for alleged involvement in the 2003 suicide bombings in Casablanca, the Interior Ministry official said. MAP said Rachidi, 37, was part of a terrorist cell involved in the killing of a Casablanca police official in 2003.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."