The 63-year-old Algerian suicide bomber क/ओ इह्त दिसम्बर १८, 2007

The 63-year-old Algerian suicide bomber
By Katrin Bennhold
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
ALGIERS: As a suicide bomber he was most unusual. But the story of Rabah Bechla, a 63-year-old grandfather of seven who rammed a truck packed with explosives into a United Nations office here last week, killing 17, is in many ways the story of Algeria itself.
Bechla's age has thrown into shock a nation accustomed to terrorism - but a terrorism usually associated with the malleable impulsiveness of youth. If his associate that day, a 30-year-old former convict who triggered the other bomb, has been described as the textbook case of a young radicalized man, Bechla represents a break with stereotype.
His case casts further doubt on the effectiveness of using profiling to detect Islamist radicals. As one prominent journalist here observed: "If a grandfather can blow himself up, anyone can."
The hunger among Algerians for an explanation has been evident in a series of disclosures about Bechla's personal life in the local press, some true - that he was very ill - others apparently wrong. For instance, two of his sons did not die for the jihadist cause; indeed they are alive and gave a long interview in their family home outside Algiers and denied that they were part of the Islamist movement.
Algerians are further intrigued by Bechla because his life contains the story of the problems that have haunted this country for six decades. As recounted by family members at Bechla's home, a cement shack in the village of Heraoua, some 30 kilometers, or 20 miles, from the capital, the family history in those years stretches from his grandfather who fought for France against Germany in World War II, his father, who they say was tortured and killed by the French during the War of Independence, and his own decision to vote for the Islamists in the 1991 presidential election.
The trajectory continues. One of his sons did something that many other young Algerians have tried: He made a desperate decision to try to get into Spain as an illegal immigrant.
"Many Algerians can identify with this story," said Mouloud Hamrouche, a former prime minister of the same age as Bechla who opposed the decision to scrap a 1991 election once it became clear that Islamists would win. "He is a real-life example of what has gone wrong over the years."
At the home in Heraoua, footsteps away from the local police station, Bechla's children and his 82-year-old mother, Zohra, were still in shock.
"We are against terrorism; we are against this act," his oldest daughter, Hadra, 33, said, sitting on an embroidered cushion in a living room crammed with women in colorful head scarves, some weeping, others shaking their heads. Behind her, on a wooden shelf, stood a worn color photograph of Bechla in his 40s, a serious-looking man with a graying beard and piercing blue eyes.
"All we ask is that people also see the other side," she said, turning her eyes to the photograph. "My father was a victim, too."
According to Hadra, Bechla started out as an enthusiastic supporter of the National Liberation Front, the governing party, which was born of the armed force that won independence from France in 1962. But she said he grew increasingly disillusioned with a regime that failed to pass on the country's energy riches to ordinary people.
In 1990, the authorities denied Bechla a taxi license when rheumatism and kidney problems made it impossible for him, an illiterate, to continue working as a vegetable trader. "He felt betrayed, after his father had died for this country," said another daughter, Assia, 28.
The family said that a year later, in what were hailed as Algeria's first free parliamentary elections, Bechla was among the millions who voted for the Islamic Salvation Front, which campaigned on a platform of generous welfare programs and won the first round handily before the army intervened.
In 1995, Assia said, Bechla learned of the arrests and torture of several sympathizers of the Islamic Salvation Front and decided to go into hiding in the eastern scrublands where Islamist militants were active. "He said that he was not strong enough to stand torture," Assia said.
Eventually, he apparently joined up with the group now called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. After several years without contact, the family heard of Bechla through friends. His wife, Aisha, who since died, urged him to accept a government amnesty and to come home.
To hear his family tell it, Bechla was not always at ease with the militants. "He wanted to come back, but he was scared: scared of the government and scared of Al Qaeda," Assia said.
"He said it was out of his hands," she added. "He could not leave them."
Hadra disputed the notion that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had paid the family compensation for the father's suicide bombing. "Al Qaeda has given us nothing," she said, pointing at the makeshift oven in the kitchen and the plastic sheet that replaced a broken window in the bathroom. "We have nothing to do with them."
She said one of her sisters only narrowly escaped the second bomb last week. And a nephew of Bechla named Ihab was killed by Islamists some years ago, she said.
One of Bechla's three sons, Younes, said initial reports that two of Bechla's sons had joined Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and died in clashes with government forces were false. Athmane, the youngest, was also in the house. Halfway through the afternoon, the third son, Mokhtar, called the family mobile phone and was put on speaker phone, recounting to loud cheers that he had just made it Melilla, a Spanish enclave on the North African coast.
"Some go to the mountains to join the terrorists, and some try to go to Europe," Hadra said. "The country is rich, but the people are poor."