.bmp)
.bmp)
Sixteen people have been killed and 74 injured after a bomb ripped through a crowd waiting for Algeria's president to arrive.The bomb exploded about 45 minutes before President Abdelaziz Bouteflika's scheduled arrival in Batna, a town about 279 miles east of the capital, Algiers.Local police said a man in his thirties had carried the explosive device in a bag into the middle of the crowd, which was waiting in front of Batna's Al-Atik mosque. Onlookers alerted the police.As police moved in towards the man, he threw down the bag and tried to flee, and the device went off, the officials said.It was not immediately clear whether he died or was wounded in the attack. There has been no immediate claim of responsibility.Bouteflika, who arrived after the blast, spoke briefly at the Batna airport, saying "the only solution was national concordance." Coordinated terror attacks killed dozens of people on April 11, when bombs ripped through the Algerian prime minister's office and a police station in an Algiers suburb.A new al-Qaida wing claimed responsibility for the April bombings, saying they were carried out by suicide bombers in trucks packed with explosives.As in the days of Noah...
