45 Killed in Algeria Blasts

Two car bombs exploded in the capital of Algeria today, killing up to 45 people, wounding 43 and jamming the city's phone lines.

Algerian security sources said the first car bomb was driven into the constitutional court building in Algiers, killing 30 people.

Ten minutes later, the second was driven into the UNHCR - the UN's refugee agency - in the upmarket Hydra neighborhood, killing 15. The UN said some members of staff were injured and the building damaged.

The country's public radio station cut into its programming to report the blasts.

People took to the streets of the city's el-Biar and Ben Aknoun districts, and the sound of police sirens could be heard.

Today's twin blasts are the latest in a series of bomb attacks in Algeria this year, and will confirm fears that al-Qaida has opened up a new front line in the Maghreb.

In April, explosions at a police station and the prime minister's office killed 30 and wounded 100 in what was thought to be the worst violence Algeria had seen since the civil war ended in 2002. Al-Qaida claimed responsibility for the blasts.

Since then, the terror group has also claimed responsibility for attacks in July and two blasts, at a coastguard barracks and among a crowd of people waiting to meet the Algerian leader, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, in September. The September bombs killed more than 50 people and injured over 150.

Intelligence services are divided about the nature of terrorist activity in the region. One view is that it remains directly linked to the bloody civil war of the 1990s and is carried out for local reasons by the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).

However, earlier this year the GSPC pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden, renaming itself the al-Qaida Organization in the Islamic Maghreb.

On September 11 last year, al-Qaida's number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released a videotaped message saying Bin Laden had personally approved the "blessed union".

Algeria collapsed into violence in 1992 after the authorities scrapped an election that an Islamist party was set to win.

President Bouteflika has vowed to pursue his controversial policy of national reconciliation, aiming to grant amnesty to Islamist activists renouncing the violence that killed around 200,000 people in the 90s.

Some 2,000 have been released from prison.