By Jon Boyle

VILLENEUVE-SUR-LOT, France, June 5 (Reuters) - A new alliance between al Qaeda and a radical Algerian Islamist group has increased the militant threat to France and Spain as well as North Africa, France's top anti-terrorism investigator said.

Jean-Louis Bruguiere said the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or GSPC, which renamed itself in January as the North African arm of al Qaeda, aimed to expand its network in France, Spain and, to a lesser extent, in Italy.

"Today, the threat posed by this alliance of the GSPC and al Qaeda constitutes a heightened threat to the countries of Northern Africa, which have been destabilised and can be destabilised even more, but also to France, which is considered as a priority target," Bruguiere told Reuters in an interview.

"The GSPC has become, as it were, a sort of regional branch of al Qaeda, its mission being to federate all the radical, Salafist organisations in North Africa -- Moroccan, Libyan and Tunisian -- and, at the same time, to provide logistical support to the Iraqi networks," he added.

Bruguiere, 63, made his comments during a campaign stop in the south of France where he is running for election to the National Assembly in June 10 and 17 parliamentary elections.

Security experts say a spate of suicide bombings in Algeria and Morocco in April marked a switch to the sort of tactics used by al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan.

HOME GROWN THREAT?

Some European counter-terrorism sources reacted with initial scepticism to the renaming of the GSPC, seeing it first and foremost as a propaganda move to exploit the al Qaeda "brand".

But Bruguiere's comments left no doubt that he sees the group, now styling itself "Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb", as a genuinely increased threat.

While France condemned the U.S.-led war in Iraq, it remains a target for Islamist radicals because it shares intelligence with Washington and its ally London, and has troops in Afghanistan helping to combat Taliban militants.

Paris has also helped leaders in its former North African colonies in their struggle to tackle Islamist radicals.

"France has always been considered by the GSPC Algerians as the main enemy," said Bruguiere, who led investigations into bomb attacks by Algerians in Paris in the mid-1990s.

As France's top investigating magistrate in charge of counter-terrorism, he has been a driving force between a major overhaul of the country's security apparatus in the past three decades and is seen as one of Europe's leading judicial authorities on Islamist radicalism.

In a magazine interview earlier this year, he said French authorities had thwarted at least one terrorist attack each year since 1996.

Bruguiere said home-grown militants posed less of a threat to France than to Britain, where four young Muslims -- three of Pakistani descent -- blew themselves up and killed 52 people on London trains and a bus in 2005.

"Most of the people who cause us problems are not integrated," Bruguiere said. "They are people who are here illegally or are immigrants. They have rejected the French system, the West."

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