Algeria: 8 police killed in ambush

Suspected Islamist militants gunned down eight police officers in an overnight ambush in eastern Algeria, security officials said Friday.

The officers, lured from their barracks by a late-night phone call about a supposed smugglers' hide-out, came under machine gun fire Thursday outside the village of Ain R'Ghiya, near the Tunisian border, officials said. All were killed.

In a separate attack Thursday morning, another officer was killed and one injured in the village of Boukalfa, some 62 miles east of the capital, Algiers, police officials said. They came under fire from two vehicles as they stood guard outside their barracks.

Authorities in Algeria have been fighting the remnants of an Islamic insurgency that broke out in the early 1990s, when the army canceled the second round of multiparty elections to prevent the expected victory of an Islamic fundamentalist party. As many as 200,000 people have died in the ensuing violence.

Holdouts from one former insurgent group — the Salafist Group for Call and Combat — renamed themselves al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa after declaring their allegiance to the international terror network. The group claimed responsibility for near-simultaneous bombings at U.N. offices in Algiers and a government building on Dec. 11 that killed at least 37 people.