CAR BOMBS IN ALGIERS TARGET U.N. AND SUPREME COURT

C O N F I D E N T I A L ALGIERS 001775 SIPDIS SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: 12/11/2017 TAGS: PTER ASEC AG SUBJECT: CAR BOMBS IN ALGIERS TARGET U.N. AND SUPREME COURT Classified By: AMBASSADOR ROBERT FORD. REASONS 1.4 (D). ¶1. (U) On December 11, for the first time in exactly eight months, car bombs hit Algiers. The first explosion occurred near the building housing UN offices in the Algiers neighborhood of Hydra, and the second in front of the Algerian Supreme Court building in Ben Aknoun at or around ¶0945. Each site is about two miles from the Embassy. The Supreme Court building sustained some damage on one side. Most of the casualties there came from a university student bus that was passing when the car bomb detonated. ¶2. (C) The UN building, which had almost no setback, sustained heavy damage. Debris from the blast landed in an Embassy-leased residential compound several hundred meters away. Initial information from UN contacts indicated that two Algerian employees were killed and over a dozen people were injured. There are also reports of a number of people still missing at the UN site. ¶3. (C) Algerian Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni said on Algiers Radio that the UN building explosion was likely a suicide attack. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, but they appear to carry the fingerprints of Al-Qaeda in the Land of Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). There was a big surge in the hits on AQIM's official website in the aftermath of the bombing; the site got nearly 2,000 hits in a period of three hours, many times the normal number. ¶4. (C) Comment: The bombs went off in posh residential areas where many high-level officials and Embassy personnel live to include other embassies' locations. Both Hydra and Ben Aknoun are usually known to be congested with traffic at that time of the day. There was an attempted car bomb on April 11 in Hydra near the National Police Chief's residence, which is very close to the UN building. Embassy will send EAC cable septel. We anticipate a vigorous Algerian security response, but the government's ability to prevent this kind of attack is limited. FORD