The group which carried out three bombings in Algeria last week, killing some 50 people, has grown from a remnant of Algeria's Islamist insurgency in the 1990s into "a viable organisation" with unhindered access to explosives, according to an American official familiar with North Africa.

He described the group now known as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), as "not big, but dangerous". The group, he said, had found a "life raft" through affiliating itself with Osama bin Laden's organisation.