Al Qaeda claims weekend attacks in Algeria

DUBAI, Mar 5 (Reuters) An al Qaeda wing claimed responsibility for two attacks in Algeria at the weekend that killed seven policemen and four gas pipeline workers.

''Our (fighters) conducted an attack on the municipal guard in Tizi Ouzou and killed a number of infidels,'' Al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb said in a statement posted on a militant Web site today.

The ambush took place yesterday in Tizi Ouzou province, some 100 km east of the capital Algiers, according to several Algerian newspapers.

In addition to the Web statement, Al Jazeera television said a man who identified himself as Abu Abduallah Ahmad, a leader of the Al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb, had called its office in Morocco to make the claim.

He said the group was also behind a roadside attack on a bus carrying workers for a Russian gas pipeline construction firm 130 kilometres south-west of Algiers late on Saturday. That attack killed three Algerians and a Russian.

''We, Al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb, claim responsibility for the bombing of the bus of the Russians, who fight Islam and its followers and our brothers in Chechnya,'' Al Jazeera quoted the speaker as saying.

''We ask the Muslim Algerian people, to keep away from the infidels and tyrant posts (to avoid) future attacks.'' The group, previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or GSPC, threatened in an earlier Internet statement to target Algerian soldiers.

Last month it claimed seven simultaneous bombings on February 13 in Algeria that killed six people.

Violence broke out in Algeria in 1992 after the military-backed authorities, fearing an Iran-style revolution, scrapped a parliamentary election that an Islamist political party, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), was set to win.

Up to 200,000 people were killed in the ensuing bloodshed.

Rebel attacks have fallen sharply in recent years but guerrilla raids by regrouped Islamic militants and sporadic shoot-outs with government forces persist, mainly in the Boumerdes and Tizi Ouzou regions to the east of Algiers.

REUTERS SP KN2332