ALGERIA: Algeria's press has accused al-Qaeda of helping to plot and carry out an attack at the weekend in which 43 people were killed, mainly members of the security forces.
Thirty-nine paratroopers from an elite army unit, including two officers and four armed civilian guards acting as guides during an exercise in the Aures mountains, were killed after they walked into an ambush laid by a group of about 60 Islamic extremists.
The attack near Batna, 430 km east of Algiers, was the deadliest against Algerian security forces since the army cancelled an election in 1992 which an Islamic fundamentalist party was poised to win.
The ambush has been blamed on the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), press reports said.
The GSPC is linked to al-Qaeda, the international terrorist network of Osama bin Laden, who is accused of having masterminded the September 11th, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
A key al-Qaeda official Emad Abdelwahid Ahmed Alwan, a Yemeni national, was killed in the Batna region last September, according to Algerian officials. Alwan was in charge of the north African region for al-Qaeda.
Several newspapers, including the state-run An-Nasr and Sawt el-Ahrar, the daily of the National Liberation Front, which swept back into power in legislative and local elections last year, wrote that "foreign elements" had taken part the attack, an allusion to al-Qaeda.
The Liberte daily openly named al-Qaeda as being involved in the attack.
Between 20 and 40 people were injured in the attack, and the assailants were able to make off with weapons and ammunition, the papers said.
The Algerian government has not officially commented on the attack, but An-Nasr confirmed the raid yesterday, saying 39 soldiers and three armed civilian guards had been killed.
L'Expression daily said the "military authorities were ill at ease" after the weekend attack.
In another attack, blamed on the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), 13 members of two families were killed in a remote village near Algiers, security services said.
The worst attack on the security forces prior to the weekend raid in Batna dates back to last April, when 21 members of the security forces were killed by Islamic extremists in Moulay Larbi, in the Saida region in north-western Algeria.
The GSPC, which splintered from the GIA in 1998, is the country's largest and best-structured insurgency and says it is opposed to the killing of civilians - who have been the main victims of the civil war.