ALGERIA:Suspected al-Qaeda militants detonated twin car bombs in the Algerian capital, Algiers, yesterday, killing up to 67 people in the bloodiest attack in the north African country since an undeclared civil war in the 1990s.
The United Nations said at least four of its employees were feared to have been killed when one blast destroyed the offices of the UN Development Programme and severely damaged the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
"I have no doubt that the UN was targeted," the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, told BBC television.
The UN has a low profile in Algeria.
Algerian interior minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni accused the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) of being behind the attacks, using the former name of al-Qaeda's north African wing.
Al-Qaeda's north African wing claimed responsibility for a similar bombing in Algiers in April and other blasts east of the capital this year that have worried foreign investors in the Opec member state.
The White House described the attackers as "enemies of humanity".
One of yesterday's blasts occurred near the constitutional court building in the Ben Aknoun district and the other was near the UN offices and a police station in the Hydra area. Several western companies have offices in both areas.
The interior minister said a suicide attacker appeared to have detonated the Hydra car bomb.
Students travelling in a school bus were among the casualties in Ben Aknoun, the official APS news agency said.
Algeria, a major gas supplier to Europe, is recovering from more than a decade of violence that began in 1992 when the then army-backed government scrapped an election a radical Islamic party was poised to win. Up to 200,000 people have been killed.
The violence has subsided, but attacks this year, including the April 11th bombing that killed 33 in Algiers, have raised fears of a return to the turmoil of the 1990s.