Comment on “Seismotectonic and seismological aspects of the Mostaganem (Western Algeria) May 22, 2014 (Mw 4.9) seismic event”

The comment is on two main points stated in the recent paper of Abbouda et al. (Arab J Geosci https://doi.org/10.1007/s12517-018-3404-y, 2018). The first point is on the mainshock epicenter location which is about 15 km away from the causative fault the authors suggested. The epicenter shift is may be due to the fact that they used only three strong-motion stations presenting a large gap (~ 320°). In this comment, we give a more constrained epicenter location of the mainshock and the event that occurred about 2–3 h before the mainshock. The second point is about their statement that the event that occurred 2–3 h before the mainshock is a foreshock without arguing. In this comment, we show that we can hardly say that this event is a foreshock by making a cross-correlation between waveforms of the two events. Furthermore, our results show that among the stations we have used, only one station which is located north-east of our epicenter shows a good coefficient of correlation. This could be due to the fact that the rupture had propagated in this direction.