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ALGIERS : Twin car bombings blamed on Al-Qaeda rocked Algiers on Tuesday killing at least 62 people, one devastating a UN office and a second blowing apart a packed bus of students, hospital and security sources said.
The United Nations said at least four of its staff were killed and 14 were missing after the attacks, which the hospital sources said left more than 100 people injured.
It was the latest of a series of bombings in the capital and other major Algerian cities this year that have killed scores. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for the past attacks and Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni blamed the Osama bin Laden followers for the new blasts.
He only confirmed 22 dead, though the hospital sources said there were at least 62 fatalities.
"We are sure that it is the work of the GSPC," he said using the old acronym for the group now known as Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb.
He said a suicide bomber triggered the explosion which ripped through the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and neighbouring UN Development Programme (UNDP) and other agencies.
The front of the building collapsed and several hours after the blast, rescuers were still struggling to reach people trapped inside the structure, many badly injured.
"It was like an earthquake," said Ameur Rekhaila, a lawyer who was on the second floor of the building when the bomb went off.
In New York, UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe said at least four UN staff were killed and 14 others were missing after the attacks.
The agency's chief, Antonio Guterres, told BBC television: "I have no doubt the UN was targeted."
The full force of another bomb, minutes earlier, blew apart a bus packed with university students as it passed the Supreme Court headed for a nearby law faculty.
Security sources said most of the dead and injured from this attack were students.
The blast left a crater several metres wide and badly damaged the Constitutional Council building which was only recently inaugurated by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
The UN office is in the Hydra district where the finance and energy ministries and several diplomatic residences are also located.
Security forces put up road blocks around the city. Prime Minister Abdelaziz Belkahdem called off a planned cabinet meeting to go to hospitals where injured were being treated.
"These are crimes which target innocents. Students, schoolchildren are among the victims," he said at one hospital.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon led international outrage over the attacks. He condemned "in the strongest possible terms the terrorist attacks in Algiers", his office said in a statement.
The United States called the attacks an act of "senseless violence".
"We condemn this attack on the United Nations office by these enemies of humanity who attack the innocent," said a White House statement.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who made a state visit to Algeria last week, denounced what he described as these "barbaric, hateful and deeply cowardly acts".
The Syrian foreign ministry called the double bombing "a cowardly terrorist act." Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero also condemned the attacks.
Al-Qaeda's offshoot in north Africa, formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has admitted responsibility for a series of bomb attacks across Algeria this year which have left more than 100 dead.
There has, however, been a relative calm in Islamist-inspired violence since September. The four dead recorded in an AFP toll for November was the lowest monthly figure since Algeria's Islamist strife erupted in 1992.
More than 100,000 people died in Algeria during a civil war in the 1990s.
On September 6, a suicide attack targeting President Bouteflika's convoy in the eastern town of Batna killed 22 people and wounded more than 100.
Two days later, another suicide attack against a barracks at Dellys, east of Algiers, left 30 people dead and 40 wounded.
In July, 10 soldiers were killed and 35 people wounded when a suicide bomber drove 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. - AFP/ls/ir/de
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