Fifteen people were killed and nearly 20 were wounded in attacks blamed on Islamic extremists in Algeria, press reports said Saturday.
Three people died of their wounds after a massacre overnight Wednesday that had already claimed seven lives near Medea, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Algiers, reports said.
In the same area on the same night, three young people were killed at a fake checkpoint.
Also Wednesday night, an armed civilian guard was killed in an attack by Islamic extremists in northwestern Mascara.
Fourteen soldiers were wounded on Friday near Skikda, in the northeast, when an explosive device detonated under their truck, the daily El Khabar reported.
Three policemen were wounded Wednesday night by a homemade mortar bomb in a town near Boumerdes, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) east of the capital, according to the daily Es Sahafa.
In Tiberkamine, near Ain Defla, 160 kilometers (100 miles) west of Algiers, the body of an Islamic militant who had surrendered to the authorities was found Thursday with his head bashed and a bullet shot to the chest.
Since the start of October some 220 people have been killed, including about 50 rebels killed in security forces operations, and about 60 people have been wounded in continuing unrest, according to tallies compiled by the press.
Most of the killings have been blamed on the hardline Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), which both rejected a conditional amnesty offered by the government to extremist groups in July 1999.
The civil war in Algeria, which broke out in 1992 after the military stepped in to deny certain electoral victory by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), has claimed more than 100,000 lives – ALGIERS (AFP)
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