ALGIERS (AFP) — An Algerian town where a suicide bombing killed 22 people in a failed bid to assassinate President Abdelaziz Bouteflika began burying its dead Friday, as condemnation of the attack grew.
State radio, giving the latest toll from Thursday's attack at Batna, in the east of the country, said that while 36 of the 107 injured had left hospital others were in critical condition.
Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni blamed Islamic militants, telling the marchers that they had resorted to suicide attacks out of desperation.
He said the bomber was a 28-year-old calling himself Abou Mokdad, belonging to a group that had been active in the west of the country but had been forced eastwards under pressure from the security forces.
Bouteflika, who had stayed on in Batna after the blast, attended the city's mosque where the prayer for the dead was said and expressed his condolences to the families of the victims.
It was near the mosque that the explosion occurred in a crowd waiting for the president to arrive on a tour of the Aures region. The attacker's behaviour had alerted those around him, prompting him to set off his bomb.
Local security sources linked the blast to Al-Qaeda's self-styled offshoot in north Africa, which killed more than 40 people and injured hundreds in three earlier attacks in Algeria this year.
In a television appearance late Thursday Bouteflika denounced the "criminals" responsible and vowed to pursue his national reconciliation policy.
The policy is intended to integrate socially Islamic activists who renounce the violence that has rocked the country since the army intervened in 1992 to cancel elections a fundamentalist party was poised to win.
About 2,000 militants have been freed from prison and the authorities say about 300 have given themselves up, earning a presidential pardon.
Only a year ago ministers were claiming victory in the war that left more than 150,000 dead, but in April car bomb attacks on government headquarters and a police station in Algiers killed 33 people and injured more than 220.
Three months later, 10 soldiers were killed and 35 people wounded when a suicide bomber rammed a truck full of explosives into barracks at Lakhdaria, 100 kilometres (60 miles) east of Algiers.
The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which has pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and renamed itself the Al-Qaeda Movement in the Maghreb, claimed responsibility for those attacks.
The authorities are still claiming successes against armed Islamic groups hiding in remote rural areas, but security sources said a new breed of suicide bombers had emerged.
Zerhouni on Thursday sought to ward off criticism of security lapses that enabled the bomber to infiltrate Batna, saying that "it could have happened anywhere," and hinting at foreign involvement.
King Mohammed VI of neighbouring Morocco expressed his "total condemnation" of the attack and assured Algeria of support to deal with "the terrorism that is the real common enemy of our brother peoples and their ancestral values."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the bombing "barbaric and senseless violence" and promised Bouteflika the "full solidarity of France and my unswerving support in your fight against terrorism."
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, currently in Chad, condemned the attack and called on the international community "to work together to reject and to combat terrorism in all of its expressions," his press office said in a statement.
The UN Security Council also stressed the need "to bring perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors of this reprehensible act of terrorism to justice."
It also reminded states that measures taken to combat terrorism must "comply with all their obligations under international law," in a non-binding statement read out by current council president, French Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert.
Russian President Vladimir Putin also "strongly" condemned the "barbarous act."
Attacks in Algeria and in Morocco have revived Western fears of Islamist militants gaining a toehold in north Africa from which to launch attacks in Europe and beyond.
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