Death toll from Algeria violence reaches year high

ALGIERS, Apr 30 (Reuters) The death toll from political violence in Algeria jumped to a year high in April, when suicide bombings killed 33 people in the capital Algiers, according to a Reuters count based on newspapers reports.

An estimated 81 people were killed in the past month including 28 Islamist rebels, compared with a total of 45 killed in March, 18 in February and 21 in January.

The Algiers bombings, the first in the centre of the Mediterranean port city in more than a decade, were believed to be the country's first suicide bomb attacks.

One of the blasts ripped part of the facade off the prime minister's headquarters, while two others hit a police station and a neighbouring gendarmerie office in the eastern outskirts of the capital.

The attacks were claimed by the Al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb, a group of Algerian Islamist rebels formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which adopted the new name in January.

Founded in 1998, the GSPC began as an offshoot of another armed group that was waging an armed revolt against the government to establish an Islamic state.

The GSPC shared the overall aims of that revolt, which began in 1992 after the then military-backed authorities, fearing an Iran-style revolution, scrapped a parliamentary election that an Islamist political party was set to win.

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

The violence has subsided sharply since the 1990s but the remaining rebels in recent months have stepped up bomb attacks on security forces and on foreign targets.

Government forces have reacted with increased assaults on Maghreb al Qaeda's strongholds in the Kabylie region east of Algiers, hoping to wipe out what remains of it after an amnesty for Islamist rebels expired.

Last week Algerian state news agency APS said the army had shot dead its coordinator and second-in-command Samir Moussaab. The group denied in a Web posting that he was one of their leaders.

Reuters SS GC1614