Algerian authorities, trying to prevent Muslim guerrillas from disrupting Thursday's local elections, have ordered markets and stadiums to close and put roads off limits to certain lorries for up to five days. The interior ministry, overseeing Algeria's state of emergency to fight Muslim rebels, said all weekly markets must close for five days from today. All trucks carrying sand, wood and construction-related materials would be banned for the same period. Domestic fuel tankers would be barred for three days from Wednesday.
Trucks, including cement mixers, have been used with devastating effect in bomb attacks in Algerian cities and towns.
The sports ministry yesterday ordered officials to shut all stadiums and postponed every sporting event for three days as of Wednesday.
The threat of violence which has shaken the country for nearly six years was illustrated early on Saturday when a bomb exploded at a shopping centre in the Ben Aknoun district in Algiers. El Watan newspaper said nine people were wounded, three seriously.
Scores of people were killed during bombings in Algiers in January and several bombs exploded at Ben Aknoun at the peak of the attacks. After a rash of bombs hit buses and public places in the run-up to last June's parliamentary poll, hundreds of thousands of voters stayed at home.
The government and legal opposition parties are urging the more than 15 million eligible voters to turn out to help rebuild the country's institutions from the destruction of nearly six years of violence.
Thursday's poll will be the first ballot to elect local authorities in more than 1,500 towns and villages and in the country's 48 provincial capitals since June 1990, when the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) swept to control in most of the elected authorities.
The FIS was banned following the cancellation of a general election in January 1992, in which the radical Islamist party had taken a commanding lead. The government also sacked FIS elected officials in the local authorities and named appointees in their places.
More than 30 parties are fielding candidates for the local ballot, including the ruling National Democratic Rally (RND) party. The FIS has called for a boycott of the poll, saying the elections would be useless in restoring peace to the north African country where more than 65,000 people have died in civil strife since early 1992.