KEY POINTS:
ALGIERS - Algerian security forces arrested a senior member of an Islamist armed group and seized 800 kg of explosives, the official news agency APS reports.
Bouderbala Fateh, the head of the Algiers section of the al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb, was arrested along with two accomplices in a raid after a tip-off from local people, the agency said, quoting a security source.
The agency, which did not state where or when the arrests took place, said the explosives had been ready to go off and were intended for use during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan which in Algeria this year began on Sept 13.
Security forces also recovered a rocket, 20 detonators and two schoolchidren's satchels rigged up as bombs.
Bouderbala, also known by the nom de guerre Abdelfatah Abou Bassir, had belonged to several armed groups over the past 14 years including the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC).
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb grew out of the GSPC in January after winning approval from Osama bin Laden to rename itself an al Qaeda affiliate.
The north African Opec member country is recovering from more than a decade of violence that began in 1992 when the then army-backed government scrapped legislative elections that a radical Islamic party was poised to win. The authorities had feared an Islamic revolution.
Up to 200,000 people are estimated to have been killed.
Al Qaeda said it was behind suicide bombings in Dellys town, east of Algiers, on Sept. 8 and a suicide blast in the southeastern town of Batna on Sept. 6 that killed a total of 57 people.
A small home-made bomb exploded in front of a police station in Zemmouri, about 50 km east of Algiers, on Sept 14, killing three people and wounding five.
Algeria's violence had fallen since the 1990s, but in the past 12 months it has regained a little of its former intensity, particularly in the mountainous Kabylie region.
A hard core of several hundred al Qaeda-linked rebels fight on in Kabylie from remote bases in dense forests.
The death toll from political violence fell to 60 in October from 75 in September, although casualties among rebels grew as government forces stepped up raids on al Qaeda hideouts, according to a Reuters count based on newspaper reports.
- REUTERS
