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ALGIERS - Two bomb attacks in the Algerian capital -- one on the UN refugee agency office and one in front of the Supreme Court -- killed at least 27 people Tuesday, officials and other sources said.
Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni said a suicide bomber was used in at least one of the two attacks -- the latest in a series this year which have mostly been claimed by Al-Qaeda.
"The death toll is very high," the minister told reporters.
Zerhouni said a suicide bomber triggered the explosion outside the Algiers office of the UN Higher Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the attack.
Security sources told AFP that 15 people were killed by the bomb.
The office is in the Hydra residential district where the finance and energy ministries and several diplomatic residences are also located. The zone is normally under tight police surveillance because of the number of foreigners who live there.
The minister added that a booby trapped bomb was used for the attack in the centre of the capital, near the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court, in which medical sources said 15 people died.
Some witnesses spoke of a school bus hit by the blast. The dead and injured were students and at least one policeman, witnesses said.
Ambulances with sirens wailing rushed to the two sites where columns of black smoke rose from wreckage.
Security forces threw up road blocks around the zone where Algeria's highest courts are located. Zerhouni spoke to reporters after visiting the scene.
There was no immediately claim of responsibility for the blasts which were minutes apart.
Al-Qaeda's offshoot in north Africa has claimed a number of recent bomb attacks in Algiers and other parts of the country which have left about 100 dead.
On September 6, a suicide attack targeting President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's convoy in the eastern town of Batna killed 22 people and wounded more than 100 others.
Two days later, another suicide attack against a coastguard barracks at Dellys east of Algiers, involving a booby-trapped car, left 30 people dead and 40 wounded.
A suicide bomber rammed a booby-trapped car into a convoy east of Algiers on September 21, wounding two French engineers and an Italian, in an attack only hours after Al-Qaeda called for an offensive against French targets.
In July, 10 soldiers were killed and 35 people wounded when a suicide bomber rammed a truck full of explosives into barracks in Lakhdaria, an Islamist stronghold.
In April, car bomb attacks on the government headquarters and a police station in Algiers killed 33 people and injured more than 220. In February, seven simultaneous bomb attacks killed six people in the Kabylie region.
All the attacks were claimed by Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, the new name for the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which has pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden.
More than 100,000 people died in Algeria during a civil war in the 1990s. - AFP/ir/ls
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