[mudvayne24]

ALGIERS (AP) — A suicide bomber blew up a car near a police station in a town east of here Wednesday, killing at least four officers and ripping off the building’s facade, witnesses said.

The blast followed twin suicide bombings on Dec. 11, one at United Nations offices and the other at a government building, that killed at least 37 people here in Algiers, the capital of Algeria.

A journalist and another resident in the city of Naciria said the car sped toward the police station and exploded. The two spoke on condition of anonymity because they feared for their safety.

The Interior Ministry said the attack killed at least four officers and wounded 20 people, including eight other officers. It provided no details other than to say that the bombing had been near the police station in the town, which is about 45 miles east of Algiers.

Al Arabiya satellite television reported that a group known as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had claimed responsibility for the attack. The group says it emerged from an alliance between the terrorist network of Osama bin Laden and an Algerian Islamist movement known as the Salafist Group for Call and Combat.

The suicide bombings in December, and others, have been claimed by the same group.

Security forces have been on maximum alert since early this week, after three trucks were stolen in the Algiers region, the newspaper Liberté reported Wednesday. The vehicles included a fuel tanker, and officials feared that they might be used in suicide attacks, the report said.

Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has increasingly used vehicles packed with explosives to deliver its strikes.

In July, a suicide bomber blew up a truck inside a military barracks southeast of Algiers, killing 10 soldiers. Two months later, at least 28 people died after an explosives-packed vehicle rammed into a coast guard barracks in the northern town of Dellys.

The newspaper Le Soir said Wednesday that security forces had detained the mastermind behind the attacks on April 11 that hit the prime minister’s office and a police station, killing 33.

The police picked up the 28-year-old suspect at his Algiers home overnight Saturday, the report cited an unidentified security official as saying.

The official said the suspect chose the targets, recruited the suicide bombers and bought the substances used to make the explosives. Officials with national security forces declined to comment on the report.

Algeria’s Islamic insurgency broke out in the early 1990s, when the army canceled the second round of the country’s first multiparty elections to prevent a likely victory by an Islamic fundamentalist party. Armed groups turned to force to overthrow the government; up to 200,000 people were killed in the violence.

The insurgency then had been dying down, with militants’ ranks dwindling after military crackdowns and amnesty offers.

But in late 2006, the main Algerian militant group began to wage larger-scale bombings and to go after foreigners — signs that Islamic fighters were regrouping.