afrol News, 29 September - A car bomb blast has killed three people and wounded six others on Sunday evening, 100 kilometers east of Algerian capital Algiers, state news agency has reported.

APS said an attack occurred near Dellys, a small port in northern province of Boumerdes when a suicide attacker attempted to run his vehicle into barracks, before being shot dead by security guards.

Sunday's bombing was first reported since attacks on 19 and 20 of August which killed over 100 people east and south-east of Algiers.

"The car bomb then exploded and killed at least 3 soldiers. The injured are in a stable condition," APS quoted local security and hospital sources as saying.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for attack, but a string of similar bombings in August was claimed by a group calling itself al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

Since adopting al Qaeda name early last year, the group, previously known as Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), has claimed several attacks including twin suicide bombings of UN offices and a court building in Algiers in December 2007 which killed 41 people.

A more or less similar bombing of barracks in Dellys in September 2007 killed at least 28 people and injured a further 60.

A spade of bombings in Algeria highlights country's inability to effectively stamp out terrorism, despite Algerian security services having improved their counter-terrorism tactics since the 1990s.

Algeria is emerging from more than a decade of conflict that began in 1992 when military backed government to scrap elections, a radical Islamic party was poised to win and 150 000 people died during ensuing violence.

Bloodshed has subsided in recent years, and in 2006 government freed more than 2 000 former Islamist guerrillas under an amnesty designed to put an end to conflict.

By staff writer

© afrol News

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