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Death Toll in Algeria's Storms Rises to 579
ALGIERS, Nov 12 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Rescue workers in Algeria searched for bodies beneath tons of rubble Monday, after violent storms killed 579 people and injured another 316 at the weekend, leaving a trail of anger over the government's handling of the crisis.
Officials said 538 of the victims were killed in Algiers, the majority of them in the working-class Bab El Oued district of the capital, which was engulfed by a mudslide on Saturday.
Protests broke out in the area Monday when President Abdelaziz Bouteflika arrived to witness the damage. Several hundred youths shouted anti-government slogans, screaming, "Assassins in power," as the head of state emerged from his vehicle. Algeria has been greatly racked by internal strife over the past decade.
The youths then headed toward the center of the capital, and were later dispersed by police.
Earlier in the day, stunned residents and the Algerian press expressed anger at the government, accusing it of incompetence in preventing the crisis and failing to give adequate help to rescue workers.
Media reports said that much of the problem was caused by the fact that authorities had blocked the drains in Bab El Oued in order to stop their use by armed extremists, thus preventing floodwaters from draining away.
Meanwhile, the North African country issued calls abroad for material and financial aid.
"Algeria needs above all solidarity, and this solidarity is beginning to show. We need technical means, material means... and any financial aid to victims would be welcomed," Algeria's ambassador to France Mohammed Ghoualmi said in an interview with Beur radio.
Paris said it would send 40 tons of relief aid for some 4,000 families displaced by the catastrophe.
Morocco's King Mohammed VI said his country "would mobilize all its resources" to help its Algerian neighbor.
Rescuers in the capital, Algiers, aided by local residents, searched desperately for more bodies buried under the rubble in Bab El Oued, but were not optimistic anyone could have survived.
"How can one survive when covered by tons of body-crushing mud?" an exhausted fireman asked. "This isn't an earthquake where the debris of houses can offer pockets of survival."
The army, equipped with bulldozers and cranes, was trying to retrieve cars, trucks and a bus wedged in thick layers of rubble and sand accumulated at the entry to Bab El Oued.
Across from the suburb, at Padovani beach, the sea continued washing up bodies of victims carried away by the deluge, with rescuers battling Monday to recover one body trapped among rocks and being battered by the waves.
Algeria's Le Soir newspaper blamed lack of drainage for the battering that Bab El Oued, a strongly Muslim area lying at the foot of a hill, received during Saturday's torrential downpour and ferocious winds.
Many of those who perished, died when vehicles they were traveling in were swept away by the wall of mud that suddenly engulfed the valley.
Witnesses said the surge was about 13 feet high and carried with it trees, lampposts and mounds of debris.
Le Soir said the authorities had in 1997 sealed off the underground drains in Bab El Oued after they found that members of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) were using them as hiding places to launch attacks on Algiers.
The GIA, like another armed movement, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has been fighting Algerian authorities since 1992 in a civil war that has claimed some 150,000 lives.
The elaborate drainage system, built by the French before independence in 1962, was sealed with concrete and was unable to carry the floodwaters away, the paper said.
Liberte newspaper said authorities had cemented up the drains soon after a wing of the GIA known as Flicha began a bombing campaign in Algiers.
Another paper, La Tribune, attributed the high casualties to years of inadequate and inefficient city planning.
The daily Oran went a step further, saying mushrooming anger with Bouteflika's government over poor social conditions, high unemployment and limited housing, said its poor handling of the floods could be the last straw.
"With the city becoming a cemetery, the last dyke which maintained a pretense of a link between the state and the people is perhaps sundered,"
Oran reported.
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