AT LEAST 21 people were killed and 20 others injured in a bomb attack on a train near Algiers yesterday, intensifying a wave of violence which is sweeping the country six weeks before Algeria's first general elections in five years.
Since Monday, 162 civilians have been killed and 48 wounded in the region surrounding Algiers.
In the latest incident, a home made bomb exploded in a morning passenger train in the neighbourhood of Gue de Constantine, the security forces said.
Since the beginning of Algeria's five year civil war, in which 60,000 people have died, according to US estimates, armed militant groups have regularly targeted rail lines and ambushed trains.
However, the latest attack is the most deadly. Even the now outlawed Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), which was poised to win the cancelled general elections of January 1992, decried the latest killings as "criminal acts" through a spokesman in Germany.
They follow a series of other massacres which have been shocking in their barbarity and scale even for a country grown used to violence.
On Monday, an armed group attacked a village 25 km from Algiers, backing, clubbing or burning to death 93 residents in Haouch Boughelef Khemisti, including 43 women and three children. It was Algeria's worst mass killing since militant and government forces began their civil war in 1992.
A day later, 42 civilians were murdered in another village, Medea, 60km south of Algiers.
Earlier this year, during the holy month of Ramadan, 400 people died in a campaign of terror.
For more than two months now, army and police units have been taking part in massive "cleaning" operations across the country, with the aim of reducing disruption of the elections on June 5th. However, these highly coordinated manoeuvres, and the setting up of village defence groups, have done little to stop civilian massacres.