CAIRO — Two car bombs struck near a hotel and a military compound in Algeria on Wednesday, killing at least 11 people and wounding 31 others, the Algerian Interior Ministry said. The blasts followed by a day a deadly attack on prospective recruits at a police academy.
The car bombs detonated about 15 minutes apart around 6 a.m. local time in the town of Bouira. The first injured four soldiers outside a regional military command center, according to the Algerian press agency. The second killed at least 11 people around the Sophie Hotel, which is reportedly used by employees of a Canadian construction company building a dam in eastern Algeria.
The state press agency said that most of those killed were on a bus passing the hotel on its way to the dam site. The agency did not list the nationalities of the victims.
The bloodshed followed Tuesday’s bombing that left at least 43 dead, most of them young men waiting to sign up for police entrance exams. The blasts were part of a string of assaults over the past 18 months that have conjured an eerie echo from the nation’s civil war of a decade ago.
No group claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s explosions, but officials suspected they were orchestrated by the emboldened al-Qaeda in Islamic North Africa.
The group has startled the country by changing the dynamics of resistance with an increasing reliance on suicide bombers attacking international targets and Algerian military and police compounds. The members of the al-Qaeda- linked organization are holdovers from Islamic militias that battled the government from 1992 until 2002, when reconciliation and amnesty programs helped end a civil war that killed an estimated 200,000 people.
A journalist who asked not to be identified said that Algerians were frustrated at the government’s inability to stop the attacks.
The most recent violence occurred in the Kabylia region where security forces have been battling militants east of the capital, Algiers.
Mustafa Bouchachi, a human- rights lawyer in Algiers, said along with crackdowns on militant cells, the government should push harder for economic development, freedom of expression and improve social conditions for a growing population of frustrated youths.
