ALGIERS - The Algerian army has for several days tracked an alleged al-Qaeda member thought to have come to the north of the country to meet with a leader of a main rebel group, press reports said here Sunday.
The army has tracked the man, identified only as a Yemeni, in the bush near Bouira, a mountain town 120 kilometers (75 miles) east of the capital Algiers, according to articles in the Expression and El Khabar dailies.
Authorities believe the man came to Bouira to meet with Hassan Hattab, the leader of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), considered by the army to be the largest and the best-structured of Algeria's armed extremist groups and mostly active in the northeast of the country.
The man is believed to be a deputy of an al-Qaeda member, Emad Abdelwahid Ahmed Alwan, another Yemeni, who was killed by security forced in September and was thought to have been the member of Osama bin Laden's network responsible for North Africa.
Algeria, wracked by an Islamist insurgency since 1992, is one of the countries worried that it may become a new operations base for al-Qaeda now that its activities in Afghanistan have been severely curtailed by the US-led military effort there.
The GSPC and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) have been waging a campaign against Algeria's secular regime since 1992, when the army cancelled the second round of a general election that a fundamentalist party looked set to win.
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