Terrorist Attack Near Morocco-Algeria Border Kills 3 Shepherds, Injures Police

Near Tlemcen in northwestern Algeria, members of a terrorist group likely affiliated with AQIM killed Monday three shepherds in the locality of Beni Snous, part of this region near the Moroccan border and located 520 km west of Algiers, reports Al Ahdath Al Maghribia. They then fled. But before that, they had placed explosive devices at the crime scene. Alerted, three police officers went to the scene to transport the bodies of the victims. On their arrival, they were injured by the explosion of these devices. According to some informed sources, this is the third attack carried out by this armed group in Algeria in recent times.

Would Morocco be in the sights of this armed group? According to Wikileaks, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, leader of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, "had pledged not to carry out any more attacks on Algerian soil, and to target Moroccan interests in particular." According to the correspondence of former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he had concluded a secret agreement with the Algerian authorities to this effect.

According to the Sahel Intelligence website, there was a meeting between the deputy director of the Algerian intelligence services and Iyad Ag Ghali, leader of the terrorist organization of the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM), during which the senior Algerian official promised his support to the terrorist leader, in order to increase his domination over the coordinations of the movements of Azawad, an alliance of separatist terrorist groups created in 2014, in northern Mali.