A car bomb exploded near a police station in a town east of Algiers on Sunday, wounding 21 people including six police officers, the Interior Ministry said.
The blast happened at about 4am GMT in Tizi Ouzou, the main town in the mountainous Berber-speaking Kabylie region of northern Algeria, a ministry statement carried by the official APS news agency said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Previous such attacks have been claimed by a group that calls itself al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and has its main base in Kabylie.
One of the attacks included twin suicide bombings that targeted United Nations offices and a court building in Algiers in December 2007, killing 41 people, 17 of them UN staff.
Algeria is emerging from more than a decade of conflict that began when in 1992 the military-backed government scrapped legislative elections a radical Islamic party was poised to win.
Authorities had feared an Iranian style revolution. About 150 000 people have been killed during the ensuing violence.
The bloodshed has subsided in recent years and in 2006 the government freed more than 2 000 former Islamist guerrillas under an amnesty designed to put an end to the conflict.
But a hard core of several hundred rebels fights on in Kabylie as members of al-Qaeda’s North Africa wing, which was previously known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat or GSPC.
Several small al-Qaeda-linked groups are also active in the Saharan south and are believed to have ties to criminal smuggling networks. — Reuters