At least two Algerian soldiers were killed and several injured in a bomb attack on a military convoy in the north-west of the country, the latest in a string of such attacks, dpa reported with reference to local media.
Unknown attackers remotely detonated the explosive Sunday as the convoy was passing on a road often used by the military in Tihammamet, around 340 kilometres west of the capital Algiers, the reports said.
The Tout sur l'Algerie (Everything on Algeria) news website reported that three soldiers had been killed and five injured. El Watan, a Francophone daily, said two soldiers had been killed and at least eight injured.
The attack, which took place on the eve of the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, came days after security forces killed three suspected extremists in Boumerdes province, some 65 kilometres east of Algiers. El Watan reported the militants were travelling in explosives-laden cars.
The army and police in northern Algeria have experienced several attacks in the past month.
At least two people were killed and 15 wounded in a suicide bombing by a suspected Islamist extremist outside a police station in the northern city of Bordj Menaiel in mid-July. In two separate bomb attacks in the north-east in late June two soldiers were killed.
Algeria has a history of Islamist violence. More than 100,000 people were killed in a bloody civil war between the state and Islamic militants in the 1990s.
Although the violence has eased, there has been a series of attacks recently, which the state blames on al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a terrorist group formed out of the remnants of a group that fought in the civil war.