ISSERS (Algeria), Aug 19: A suicide attack on Tuesday on a police school killed 43 people and wounded 38, authorities said as Algeria reeled from its worst militant assault this year.

An Al Qaeda group has claimed previous suicide attacks in Algeria but officials gave no indication who was behind the attack on candidates waiting to take an examination at Issers, 60 kilometres east of Algiers.

The Interior Ministry stressed that the casualty toll was still provisional.

But it is already the deadliest attack this year in Algeria and worse than the December 2007 attacks in Algiers against government and United Nations buildings, which killed 41 people and injured many others.

Witnesses said that the attacker drove a car packed with explosives at the main entrance to the school as university graduates waited outside to start an entry exam in the hope of joining the paramilitary gendarmerie.

“It’s utter carnage,” said the elderly father of one of those killed in the attack. “It’s a catastrophe,” he said, weeping. “May God punish them for the crime they have committed against these youngsters, and their country.” His son had been one of those hoping to join one of the most prestigious units of the gendarmerie.

Another candidate survived because he went to buy cigarettes but his father, mother and brother were killed in the blast, witnesses said.

As well as devastating the entrance to the school, the blast destroyed several nearby houses, blew out windows in nearby shops and tore up trees.

The explosion left a crater several metres across. Civilians and police were among the victims, witnesses said.

Emergency workers gathered up the remains of the dead, wrapping them in blankets and placing them in waiting ambulances.

Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni went to the scene, surrounded by heavy security, and told journalists: “This is an act against Algerians.” The attack was just the latest in a series on security forces in recent weeks and comes in the run-up to the Ramadan, when Muslims observe a month of fasting and spiritual reflection. Ramadan is considered a peak period for “jihad” or holy war.Tuesday’s newspapers here reported an attack on Sunday in which Islamist extremists killed 11 members of the security forces and a civilian in an ambush in the east of the country.

That attack, in the Skikda region, also left about a dozen security officers wounded, the Quotidien d’Oran and Liberte newspapers said. Four Islamist militants were killed.

One soldier killed in the ambush was Lieutenant-Colonel Rahmouni Mohammed, 47, the papers said.

On Thursday last week (Aug 14) the military commander in the mountainous Jijel region, Abdelkader Yamani, was killed with his driver when a bomb blew up under their four-wheel-drive vehicle.

On Aug 9, a suicide bomber rammed a van full of explosives into a police post at the beach resort of Zemmouri el-Bahri, in eastern Algeria, killing eight people and injuring 19 others.

Less than a week earlier, on Aug 3, another suicide attack on a police at Tizi Ouzou, in the eastern Kabylie region wounded 25 people.

Responsibility for that attack was claimed by Al Qaeda’s North African branch.

They also claimed a July 23 attack in which police said a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up and injured 13 Algerian soldiers in Lakhdaria, also east of Algiers.

These attacks ended a six-month period of relative calm that followed the devastating December bombings in Algiers.

That attack triggered the reinforcement of anti-terrorism and security measures around public buildings, as well as an attempt to clamp down on terrorist networks.

Between January and July, Algerian courts handed down 218 death sentences in absentia to armed Islamists on the run, according to judicial sources.—AFP