ALGIERS (AFP) - The suicide bomber behind last week's attack at an Algerian naval barracks which killed 30 was a 15-year-old student, according to a statement from Al-Qaeda's self-styled offshoot quoted Monday.
Nabil Belkacemi, who carried out Saturday's blast at the port town of Dellys, 70 kilometres (45 miles) east of Algiers, had assumed the nom-de-guerre Abu Musab al-Zarqawi after a Jordanian Al-Qaeda leader killed by US forces in Iraq, the Al-Watan daily said, quoting the statement.
An accompanying photograph showed a smiling Belkacemi, dressed in military fatigues and holding a Kalashnikov assault rifle.
Born in Bachjarah, a suburb of the seaside capital Algiers which had been the scene of clashes in the 1990s between armed Islamist groups and security forces, the teenager left his home in the middle of June, according to his mother.
"He spent the night in the mosque and then he disappeared," she told Al-Watan. "He called me on a cellphone and asked me not to worry and said he would be back soon. It was ten days before a critical school exam," she said.
But in another telephone call, he said: "Mother, I am scared, I don't know where I am. I would like to escape but I am scared they (the Islamists) will kill you. They told me that if I ever escaped, they would take it out on you.
"But don't be scared, I will manage to escape."
The Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which has pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and renamed itself the Al-Qaeda Movement in the Maghreb, has claimed responsibility for the Dellys attack and a bombing on Thursday in the eastern city of Batna, in which 22 people were killed .
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