ALGIERS, (Islamweb & Agencies) -An armed group killed 10 people overnight in Ouzera in the Medea region, 80 kilometres (50 miles) south of the Algerian capital, security officials said Friday.
The Medea region is in an area which was known as the "triangle of death" because of deadly attacks in the mid-199Os blamed on Islamic groups at the height of an insurgency they have waged since 1992.More than 90 people, among them 40 members of Algeria's security apparatus, have been killed by alleged Islamic groups across the country since the beginning of June, according to a toll compiled by authorities and the media.
Violence since the outbreak of the war has claimed more than 100,000 lives, most of them civilian. (Map: photo caption below)
Reports meanwhile say a member of the country's upper house of parliament, Mohamed Boudiar, has been kidnapped by a group of extremists while he was travelling in the east of the country.
The official APS news agency said the attack took place overnight on Wednesday, when the vehicle in which he was travelling was stopped at what it described as a bogus road block in the Kherza region about 600 kilometres from the capital, Algiers.
The kidnappers were reported to have killed two people and kidnapped a second person.
Security forces have been combing the area in the hope of tracking down the kidnappers and their captives.
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Algeria, a gateway between Africa and Europe, has been battered by violence over the past half-century and remains at war with itself. More than a million Algerians were killed in the fight for independence from France in 1962 and an estimated 100,000 have died in the current power struggle. (BBC, country profiles).