ALGERIA: Another sad morning

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A bomb attack in northern Algeria Tuesday killed at least two and injured 23.,according to the official Algerie Presse Service. Other news services said four were killed in the 6:30 a.m. explosion, which damaged half a dozen buildings.

It was the latest in a string of attacks in the North African country. The target this time apparently was a mobile unit of the country’s judiciary police in the town of Thenia, in an area about 30 miles east of the capital, Algiers.

On Jan. 2, a suicide bomber rammed a car into a police station in Naciria, 75 miles east of Algiers, killing four policemen and wounding 20 others.

As many as 41 people were killed on Dec. 11 when two suicide truck bombs rammed into a United Nations building and a court complex in the capital. Seventeen of those killed were U.N. employees.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb claimed responsibility for both attacks.

The United Nations has offered to help Algerian authorities investigate that attack, but the government has spurned the offer.

To combat Al Qaeda’s influence, Algerian television stations have aired a program in which clerics lambaste suicide bombings and attacks on civilians, according to a summary of clippings posted on the blog of Memri, the Middle East Media and Research Institute.

The Algerian government in the past ordered army airplanes to drop leaflets on pro-Al Qaeda neighborhoods with a fatwa by a Saudi Arabian cleric denouncing the struggle against the Algerian government.

— Borzou Daragahi in Beirut