Attack on U.N. in Algeria Shows Terror War Rages On
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Hopes that progress toward the defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq is bringing to an end the worldwide war on terror were rudely shattered yesterday when at least 67 were killed in two Al Qaeda-inspired suicide car bomb attacks that destroyed U.N. offices and the Supreme Court in the Algerian capital.
The explosions, which took place minutes apart, were the work of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, formerly the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which in January joined forces with Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan-based terrorist network.
The group’s stated aim is to install an Islamist government in Algiers and attack prominent international targets.
Yesterday’s attacks were the most lethal in Algeria since the decade-long civil war in the 1990s, which began after the military intervened to prevent an Islamist party from winning power. More than 200,000 were killed in that conflict, mostly by bombs and arbitrary acts of violence.
The Algiers blast was also the most violent attack on a U.N. installation since the truck bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on August 19, 2003, which killed 22, including the U.N. secretary-general’s special representative in Iraq, Brazilian diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello.
The two explosions yesterday reduced to rubble the new Constitutional Council building, recently completed by the Chinese, killing at least 50, as well as the offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the nearby headquarters of the U.N. Development Program in the affluent Hydra suburb of Algiers.
“We’re still trying to account for 14 people,” a U.N. spokeswoman, Marie Okabe, told reporters in New York. She said that at least four U.N. staff members may have died. Ten Algerian employees of the United Nations were killed in the blast, according to a U.N. source reported by the French newspaper Libération.
At least 20 university students were killed when the blast aimed at the court ripped through a bus taking them to Ben Aknoun University.
Sophie Haspeslagh of the UNDP told the BBC that a colleague saw a white truck drive into the U.N. offices, then explode.
“Everything shattered. Everything fell. I hid under a piece of furniture so I wouldn’t be hit by the debris,” she said. “One of my colleagues had a big wound in her neck. She was bleeding severely.”
“It was like an earthquake,” a lawyer, Ameur Rekhaila, who saw the façade blown off the court building, told Libération.
“I was in my office and heard an explosion in the distance. When I went downstairs, I was hit by another explosion just in front of our building,” a bomb victim told France-2 television from his hospital bed.
Al Qaeda in the Mahgreb claimed responsibility for the bombings in a statement published on an Islamist Web site, according to SITE, an American group that monitors extremist Internet messages.
It is thought that Al Qaeda is determined to show that it can continue to successfully destroy western targets despite the setbacks it has suffered in Iraq since the success of the American military surge.
“Al Qaeda wanted to send a strong message that it is still capable despite the loss of several top leaders,” a security specialist and editor of the Lebanese newspaper en Nahar, Anis Rahmani, told Reuters.
As well as attracting condemnations from President Bush, who called the blasts “senseless violence” committed by “enemies of humanity who attack the innocent,” and President Sarkozy, who visited Algeria last week and described the blasts as “barbaric, hateful, and deeply cowardly acts,” the bloodshed brought denunciations from the Palestinian Arab leader, Mahmoud Abbas, and representatives of the Arab League.
Even the Syrian Foreign Ministry, condemned by the State Department as a state sponsor of terror, described the double attack as “a cowardly terrorist act.”
“This was an abjectly cowardly strike against civilian officials serving humanity’s highest ideals under the U.N. banner. Base, indecent, and unjustifiable by even the most barbarous political standard,” the U.N. secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, said in a statement from Bali, Indonesia, where he is attending a U.N.-led climate change conference.
The Algerian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who was the target of an Al Qaeda suicide bomb attack on his car on September 6, called King Juan Carlos of Spain, Mr. Sarkozy, and Mr. Abbas for commiseration, the official Algerian news agency reported.
The British foreign secretary, David Miliband, said the bombings should be met by a renewed, concerted international effort to combat terrorism. “These heinous actions demonstrate once again the need for the international community to work together, including under the umbrella of the U.N., to combat the threat of terrorism,” he said in a statement.
The blasts exposed the lax security measures meant to protect U.N. personnel in Algeria. The truck bomber drove into the building because traffic was not restricted in front of the U.N. building.
Al Qaeda-inspired violence has struck Algeria twice already this year.
In April, three suicide bombers attacked government buildings in Algiers, killing 30. In September, another 57 were killed during the assassination attempt on Mr. Bouteflika in the southeastern town of Batna.