ALGIERS, Algeria: Al-Qaeda’s new wing in North Africa claimed responsibility for coordinated suicide bombings yesterday that ripped through the prime minister’s office and a police station in Algeria, killing at least 24 people.

The attacks – which also wounded some 222 people – were a devastating setback to the country’s peace efforts and highlighted the menacing spread of Islamic militancy across North Africa.

One car bombing tore holes in the walls of the premier’s office, where people in bloodstained clothes stumbled toward ambulances. Two other vehicles exploded outside a police station east of the capital, blasting craters into the ground and damaging the building.

The group that claimed responsibility, Al-Qaeda in Islamic North Africa, has waged a series of recent bombings jeopardising Algeria’s tentative peace. The country has been trying to turn the page on a 15-year Islamic insurgency that killed 200,000 people.

Until recently, the peace efforts seemed successful: Military crackdowns and amnesty offers had turned Algeria’s fighters into a ragtag assembly of fighters in rural hideouts.

But late last year, the main Algerian main militant group, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, changed its name to Al-Qaeda in Islamic North Africa and began targeting foreigners – signs the country’s dwindling ranks of Islamic fighters were regrouping.

The attacks were the deadliest to hit the Algiers region since 2002, when a bomb in a market in a suburb killed 38 people and injured 80. The targeting of the premier’s office was among the most brazen in Algerian history.

The date of the attacks was 11 April, which has potentially symbolic meaning. Attacks on the 11th day of the month are a hallmark of attacks led by Al-Qaeda and its admirers.

Prime Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem – who was not in his office when the attack occurred – called the bombings a “cowardly, criminal terrorist act” as he spoke to reporters outside the wrecked building. Parts of six floors were ripped away, and the iron gates outside were bent by the blast’s force.

The Algerian government did not name suspects. But Al-Jazeera television reported that it received a call from a spokesman for Al-Qaeda’s North Africa wing saying the blasts were waged by three suicide bombers in vehicles packed with explosives.

The bombers had three targets, the caller said: the premier’s office, the Interpol offices and a special police forces building in the eastern suburb of Bab Ezzouar. It was not immediately clear if Interpol has an office there.

Two police officers in Bab Ezzouar said the blasts there had been waged by separate suicide bombers. Fahem Abderraman, injured in that attack, said he was driving by the station when a strong explosion blasted through the car.

“I thought I had gone to heaven,” said Abderraman, whose neck was bandaged.

Fayza Kebdi, a lawyer who works opposite the government building in Algiers, said the blast shattered her windows and blew her husband clear across the room.

“We thought the years of terrorism were over,” she said. “We thought that everything was back to normal. But now, the fear is coming back.”

Witnesses said they had seen a red car drive toward the premier’s office. Police opened fire to try to stop it, and the car then exploded. A charred, wrecked car lay on the pavement near the building – a modern white, block-like high-rise that also houses the Interior Ministry.

Civil defence officials reported that the bombing of the government building killed at least 12 people and injured 135. Their statement said 12 others were killed and 87 wounded in the attack on the police station, which is on the road to Algiers’ airport.

The bombings came just one day after three suspected terrorists in neighbouring Morocco blew themselves up as police were closing in, and a fourth was shot and killed by police while he appeared to be preparing to detonate his explosives.

Although there was no immediate apparent link between the violence in Morocco and Algeria, the back-to-back events illustrated how North African nations are struggling to contain Islamic extremism.

Experts and intelligence officials are concerned that militants could extend their attacks across the Mediterranean to Europe. The problems in Iraq, as well as the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, are fuelling North Africa’s Islamist movement, said Louis Caprioli, former assistant director of France’s DST counterterrorism and counterintelligence agency.

Those issues are “mobilising people and legitimising their combat,” he said.

Algeria’s insurgency broke out in 1992, after the army cancelled legislative elections that an Islamic party appeared set to win.

Ensuing violence, attacks and massacres left an estimated 200,000 dead – civilians, soldiers and Islamic fighters – according to the government. Algeria’s military led a crackdown on militants hiding out in the country’s brush and mountains, while the government tried to reconcile the nation with amnesty offers to militants willing to turn in their weapons.

The prime minister expressed bitterness at insurgents who refused the amnesty.

“The Algerian people stretched out a hand to them, and they respond with a terrorist act,” he said.

Al-Qaeda’s North Africa wing has claimed responsibility for several recent attack on foreigners.

A 3 March bombing of a bus carrying workers for a Russian company killed a Russian engineer and three Algerians.

A December attack near Algiers and targeting a bus carrying foreign employees of an affiliate of Halliburton killed an Algerian and a Lebanese citizen.