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Bomb Blast in Algiers Ahead of Chirac Visit
ALGIERS, Nov. 21 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A powerful bomb exploded Tuesday at a busy bus station in the Algerian capital of Algiers, injuring at least 18 people, news agencies reported.
Three students, two women and a man, are reported to have had their legs blown off by the blast, reported the BBC's online service.
The explosion ripped through the Tafourha bus station at about 08:45 local time (0745 GMT) when many people were heading to work and universities. Police were deployed across the city and rushed to the scene alongside emergency teams.
The attack, on the fourth day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, has raised fears of a new upsurge of violence in Algeria. The bomb attack was the first in Algiers in nearly three months. In late August, 34 people were injured when a bomb exploded in the city.
"I was waiting for the bus when I was blown off my feet by a powerful blast. My legs hurt," said one survivor, law student Chahira Guechou, 21, from her hospital bed, reported BBC.
Algerian Interior Minister Nourredine Yazid Zerhouni visited the scene, where a small crater in the bloodstained pavement was littered by sheets of paper blown from the students' textbooks and notebooks.
No one has admitted carrying out the attack.
A police officer at the bus station said a homemade bomb had been hidden in a satchel and suggested the attacker had probably been dressed like a student.
The bomb blast came less than two weeks before Jacques Chirac is due to pay the first visit to Algeria by a French president since a tide of violence engulfed the north African country in 1992, reported the
Algeria Daily paper.
Chirac is due to visit Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria in early December. His trip will be the first by a French head of state since Francois Mitterrand visited Algiers in 1989 and follows a visit by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to France, the former colonial power in Algeria, last year.
Tuesday's bombing struck as Algiers struggles to cope with the effects of a serious flood in which more than 700 people died 10 days ago. Nearly 200 people are still missing after a lethal combination of mud and water swept through the working class Bab el-Oued quarter of the city.
For the last two years, Algiers and its surrounding areas have largely been free of the violence that has gripped the rest of the country, mainly because of a concentrated security effort by the army in the capital.
Algiers was targeted last August when a bomb exploded in the Kasbah. This was followed in September by an attack on a village 12 miles west of Algiers in which seven people died.
During the height of violence in the mid-1990s, the capital was rocked by car bombs, which killed hundreds of civilians. However, in the past few years, the violence has taken place mostly outside Algiers.
More than 100,000 people are estimated to have been killed in politically related violence since 1992, when the army cancelled elections that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) seemed certain to win.
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