Twelve Killed By Mini-Tsunami In Algeria
Pastor Dale Morgan
Twelve Killed By Mini-Tsunami In Algeria*
The tsunami struck near the town of Mostaganem.
by Staff Writers
Algiers (AFP) Aug 08, 2007
A giant wave described by local residents as a "mini-tsunami" claimed
the lives of 12 Algerian bathers last week on a beach in the west of the
Mediterranean-rim country, officials said Wednesday. Algeria's civil
protection agency could give no official explanation for the giant wave
that struck a beach near the town of Mostaganem on Friday. Loth
Bonatiro, a chief research scientist at Algeria's Centre for Research in
Astronomy, Astrophysics and Geophysics (CRAAG), said he thought the wave
could have been the result of conventional weapons' testing.
The phenomenom "could have been caused by a scientific test and one
could guess that it was a scientific test of conventional weapons," he
told AFP, adding that France, Italy and Spain all conduct these sorts of
tests.
"It is however difficult to speak of a tsunami, because such an event is
on a much larger scale, while the wave at Mostaganem affected only one
beach," the professor said.
A tremor measuring 4.6 on the Richter scale was registered at 2108 GMT
in the middle of the Mediterranean basin by an observation centre in the
French city of Strasbourg, but not by the CRAAG.
The failure to detect this tremor could have been down to a malfunction
of the centre's instruments, said Bonatiro.
Source: Agence France-Presse