THE CANADIAN PRESS

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ALGIERS, Algeria - Twin car bombings rocked a hotel and military headquarters in the Algerian town of Bouira killing a dozen people who worked for Montreal-based engineering giant SNC Lavalin Inc. a day after a suicide bombing in a neighbouring region killed 43.

SNC-Lavalin (TSX:SNC) said Wednesday the 12 dead were Algerians on a bus heading to work at the Koudiat Acerdoune water treatment plant the company is building in the north African country.

Another 15 Algerian workers were also wounded, the company said.

"SNC-Lavalin would like to extend its deepest sympathies to the families of the victims, and to those who are currently being treated in a local hospital," the Montreal constructiona and engineering company said.

"We would like all our employees to know that we strongly deplore this act of terrorism, and that their health and safety remains a top priority for the company."

SNC-Lavalin, Canada's largest engineering group, has operations around the world, including risky countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

Wednesday's first bomb targeted the regional military command in Bouira province, 95 kilometres southeast of Algiers, and injured four soldiers, the state-run APS news agency reported.

Initial reports suggested that 11 people died and 27 were wounded when a second bomb went off a minute later next to a hotel in downtown Bouira.

Both bombs were set off by remote control, officials said.

Just 50 kilometres to the north, in adjacent Boumerdes province, a suicide bomber on Tuesday rammed a car into a line of applicants at a police academy in the town of Les Issers, killing at least 43 people and injuring 45.

No one has claimed responsibility for the bombings Wednesday or five other attacks this month, but all occurred in the area east of the capital where an Algerian offshoot of al-Qaida is believed to operate.

A security official in the Bouira area told The Associated Press that nearly all the victims Wednesday were civilians. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't allowed to discuss such matters with the media.

The military barracks was most damaged.

"Parts of the walls have fallen off, the fence is destroyed, cars are buried under the rubble," Abdellah Debbache, the Bouira correspondent of Algeria's Liberte newspaper, told The AP by telephone.

Algerian news reports said the facade of the barracks had been torn off and that several other buildings had been damaged.

Bouira was cordoned off by police, and several additional roadblocks were set up in the surrounding region.

The string of recent attacks is raising questions about Algeria's ability to halt insurgent violence.

"Terrorism: Is the State Powerless?" read a large headline on the independent El Watan newspaper's cover page, which was blackened and carried a single, large photograph of Tuesday's attack.

It also reported that another road bombing had targeted a convoy of Japanese construction workers operating on a highway near Constantine in eastern Algeria. One police escort was injured.

Many other newspapers also questioned whether the government's policy of national reconciliation with Islamists, approved in a 2005 referendum, was giving radical groups too much elbow space to regroup and find new support.

The original founder of the militant group GSPC, which changed its name to al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa in 2006, issued a condemnation of the attacks Tuesday.

"Quit all subversive action," said Hassan Attab in remarks published in several newspapers, stating the armed insurgency was at "a dead end." Attab, who has been dismissed by the more militant members of the GSPC and now lives at an undisclosed location.

The authenticity of his statement could not be independently verified, but it was issued on a website usually used by Islamists and reproduced in most Algerian media.

Violence has dramatically increased since 2006, when the GSPC, Algeria's last big extremist group left over an insurgency in the 1990s, renamed itself and joined Osama bin Laden's network.

The insurgency broke out in 1992, when the army cancelled the second round of legislative elections that an Islamist party was expected to win. Ensuing fighting between security forces and Islamic militants left some 200,000 people dead.