Eleven UN employees are believed to have been among those killed when car bombs hit UN and other buildings in Algiers yesterday and more UN staff were still unaccounted for, a UN spokeswoman said.
At least 26 people were killed when suspected al-Qaeda militants detonated twin car bombs in Algeria's capital, in one of the bloodiest attacks since civil strife in the 1990s.
The body of a bomb blast victim lies outside the constitutional court building in Algiers
An official tally put the death toll at 26, while a Health Ministry source said 67 people were killed. Algeria's state radio said the dead included three Asian nationals, a Dane and one Senegalese.
"We are now putting the UN death toll at 11," UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe said. Earlier she said, "A number of staff still remain unaccounted for and the situation, as you know, remains fluid."
A UN statement said one of the two blasts destroyed the offices of the UN Development Programme, or UNDP, and severely damaged the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, in the Algerian capital.
The Geneva-based commissioner, Antonio Guterres, said in an interview he had "no doubt that the UN was targeted". He said the blast occurred in a street separating the main UN office from UNHCR's compound.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, attending a climate change conference in Indonesia, said in a statement: "Words cannot express my sense of shock, outrage and anger at the terrorist attack on the United Nations mission in Algiers today.
"This was an abject cowardly strike against civilian officials serving humanity's highest ideals under the UN banner - base, indecent and unjustifiable by even the most barbarous political standard."
A statement by the 15-nation Security Council also condemned "in the strongest terms ... this heinous act of terrorism" and called on all states to cooperate with Algeria to bring the perpetrators and their backers to justice.