DAKAR, Senegal — A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the French Embassy in Mauritania’s capital on Saturday night, slightly wounding two embassy security guards who were jogging near the walls.
“Someone approached them and blew himself up,” a spokesman for the French Embassy, Marc Flattot, said in a telephone interview from the capital, Nouakchott.
“It wasn’t a big explosion,” he said.
“There were a number of light wounds. They were shocked,” he said of the security guards, who were hospitalized for observation.
“No doubt they had been spotted,” Mr. Flattot said.
Mauritania is a large Islamic country of mostly desert that has suffered a number of attacks attributed to a North African militant group affiliated with Al Qaeda, including the killing of an American in June.
But there had not been a suicide bombing on record, and analysts and diplomats in Nouakchott considered Saturday’s attack an escalation of terrorist activities in a land whose vast, unpatrolled northern frontiers have become a cause of concern to counterterrorism officials.
“They’re clearly becoming more active,” a Western diplomat in Nouakchott said of the militant group, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. “It’s the first time we’ve seen them do it here.”
The diplomat cautioned, though, that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had previously shown its ability to bring militants into Mauritania from neighboring Mali.
Now, the diplomat said, “It’s perhaps more focused.”
On Saturday night, a Mauritanian Web site said to be close to the government, the Agence Nouakchott d’Information, reported that the suicide bomber was a Mauritanian.
It said the bomber cried “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” before blowing himself up as he approached the two Frenchmen.
The police told Agence France-Presse that the suspect was a jihadist who had been sought by security officials.
No responsibility for the bombing was claimed Saturday night.
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb previously declared itself responsible for the shooting of the American, Christopher Leggett, six weeks ago on a street in Nouakchott. Saturday’s attack, unlike the shooting, took place in the heart of the capital’s diplomatic and upper-end residential district, Tevragh Zeina.
Three Mauritanians were charged with murder last week in Mr. Leggett’s death; one was wearing an explosives belt that did not detonate when he was arrested in July.
Three others, accused of close ties to Al Qaeda, are in custody in the killing of four French tourists in Mauritania in 2007.
Also in July, one of the Qaeda branch’s leaders threatened war against France over President Nicolas Sarkozy’s declarations against the burqa, the head-to-toe covering worn by some Muslim women.
France is the former colonial power in Mauritania and provides millions of dollars in aid each year.
Earlier last week, Mauritania’s newly elected president, the former coup leader and general Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, declared at his inauguration that he would “spare no effort in the fight against terrorism and its causes.”
Mauritania is considered to be a country of moderate Islam; the Islamist candidate in the recent presidential elections got little support.
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb recently carried out attacks in the desert in the neighboring country of Mali, including an encounter with a Malian Army patrol and the killing of a senior Malian Army officer in his home.
“This is the logical follow-up to the recent encounters in the north of Mali,” said Isselmou Ould Moustapha, the editor of Tahalil Hebdo, a newspaper in Nouakchott.
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Paris.
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