As a suicide bomber, Rabah Bechla was most unusual. But the story of Mr Bechla, a 63-year-old grandfather of seven who rammed an explosives-packed truck into a United Nations office in Algiers on December 11, killing at least 17 people, is in many ways the story of Algeria itself.

The bomber’s age, earlier reported as 64, has puzzled a nation accustomed to terrorism associated with the malleable impulsiveness of youth. If his associate that day, a 30-year-old ex-convict who set off the second of two bombs, was described as a textbook case of a young radicalized man, Mr Bechla breaks the usual stereotypes. As with the cases of the first woman to become a suicide bomber in the Palestinian territories and the first ethnic European convert to Islam caught with explosives, his case casts further doubt on the practice of profiling.