Al-Qaeda's branch in North Africa claimed responsibility for an attack on Russian gas workers in Algeria, in an internet message, saying it was to avenge Russia's actions in Chechnya.
"Mujahedeen (Islamic warriors) using a high intensity bomb targeted the convoy of Russian infidels working for the Russian company Stroytransgaz," according to the statement signed by the Al-Qaeda Organization in the Maghreb.
A Russian engineer and three Algerians were killed and five other people wounded in the bomb attack on their bus on Saturday at Hayoun, near Ain Defla in southern Algeria.
The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) has, since last September, taken on the name of Osama bin Laden's terror network for North Africa.
"We dedicate this modest conquest to our Muslim brothers in Chechnya ... victims of the criminal (Russian President Vladimir) Putin," it said in the statement posted on an Islamist site often used by Al-Qaeda.
The bus was carrying employees of the Russian firm, who were laying gas mains between Ain Defla, in the region of Medea, and Tiaret, 340 kilometers southwest of the capital, the Algerian newspaper El-Khabar reported.
The attack was the second claimed by the GSPC in recent months against foreigners based in Algeria, long troubled by Islamic extremist violence.
Last December one person was killed and nine injured in an attack on a bus carrying staff of the Brown and Root Condor (BRC) company, a subsidiary of the Algerian Sonatrach oil company and of US construction firm Halliburton.
The Algerian driver died, and a US citizen, four Britons, a Canadian, two Lebanese and an Algerian were among the injured.
The GSPC, a small armed group formed by dissidents of the Islamic Armed Group, is the only remaining group from the radical movements that waged an insurgency against the secular Algerian state from 1992.
(AFX News, 05/03/2007)