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Twin attacks rocked a city outside Algeria’s capital on Monday as Pope Leo XIV started a historic visit to the country, a source with knowledge of the case said and video images verified by the AFP news agency showed.
“There were two security incidents yesterday afternoon in Blida, incidents of a terrorist nature. Two suicide bombers blew themselves up and were killed,” the source told AFP on Tuesday, referring to the city some 45 kilometres southwest of Algiers.
Video images verified by AFP showed two bodies in the street in Blida.
The videos were released a few hours after the pope’s arrival in Algiers. It was not clear when they were filmed.
The American pontiff on Monday became the first pope ever to visit Algeria, the first stop on a tour of four African nations.
No link has yet been established between the attacks and the pope’s visit to the country, which was conducted under tight security.
Algeria’s army regularly announces the arrests or deaths of “terrorists,” the authorities’ term for armed Islamists who are still active since the North African country’s 1992-2002 civil war.
But attacks and bombings by militants are rare.
The most recent recorded suicide attack in Algeria was in February 2020. It targeted a military base and killed a soldier in the south of the country near the Malian border, and was claimed by the so-called Islamic State (IS) group.
The African Union on Tuesday condemned what it had said was an attempted double attack before retracting its comments.
AU spokesman Nuur Mohamud Sheekh said this was because the information on which the statement was based had “not been corroborated by official sources.”
Algerian authorities have not confirmed the attack or commented on the African Union’s statement, which was later removed from the regional body’s official webpage and social media accounts.
In the original AU statement, the chairperson of the African Union Commission, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, had said he “condemns in the strongest possible terms the double attack that occurred on April 13, 2026, in Blida.”
“He extends his sincere condolences to the families of the victims, expresses his deepest sympathy, and wishes a speedy recovery to the injured,” the statement said, before it was deleted.
In March, the army said it had killed seven jihadists and lost three soldiers in an operation in the east of the country near the Tunisian border.
Additional sources • AFP