Several people were killed in a suicide attack Tuesday morning on a police school at Issers, in the Kabylie region of Algeria, 60 kilometres (40 miles) east of Algiers, witnesses told AFP.

The attacker drove a car packed with explosives at the main entrance to the school as candidates for an entry exam were waiting outside, said witnesses. Civilians as well as police officers were among the victims they said.

The Algerian authorities had not yet issued an announcement about the attack, but witnesses at the scene said that a major security operation was under way there.

Tuesday's attack comes as Algeria's newspapers reported an attack on Sunday in which Islamist extremists killed 11 members of the security forces and a civilian in an ambush in the east of the country.

That attack, in Skikda, was one of the deadliest in the recent weeks and also left about a dozen security officers wounded, the newspapers Quotidien d'Oran and Liberte said.

The papers also reported that four Islamist militants were killed in the attack. No group has yet claimed responsibility for the ambush.

One bomb exploded as security forces in a convoy of three vehicles were on patrol in a mountainous area of the Skikda region.

A second bomb targetted soldiers who had come to back up the security forces engaged in fierce clashes with the insurgents.

One of the soldiers killed in the ambush was Lieutenant-Colonel Rahmouni Mohammed, 47, the papers said.

On Thursday, the military commander in the region, Abdelkader Yamani, was also caught up in an ambush in the same area.

The Islamist militants, chased by security forces in Kabylia, were trying to regroup in the nearby Skikda region, the newspapers said.