BERLIN, Aug. 20 -- Synchronized car bombs killed at least 11 people in Algeria Wednesday morning, a day after a suicide bomber drove an explosives-packed car into a police academy, killing 43.

It was the worst stretch of violence to strike the North African country since its civil war in the 1990s.

About 6 a.m. Wednesday, a car bomb exploded outside a military command post in the city of Bouira, about 60 miles southeast of the capital, Algiers. One minute later, another car bomb detonated next to a bus picking up passengers outside the Hotel Sofi, in Bouira's city center.

The state-run Algerian Press Service reported that at least 11 people were killed and 31 wounded in the twin blasts, most of them at the hotel. It was unclear if the explosions were the work of suicide bombers or detonated by remote control, witnesses said.

A day earlier, a suicide bomber targeted a police training school in the city of Issers, about 35 miles east of the capital. The Reuters news agency quoted witnesses as saying that the driver plowed into a crowd of young people lined up outside the academy awaiting the start of entrance exams.

At least 45 people were wounded in the Issers attack, the Algerian Press Service reported. All but one of the dead were civilians, the Interior Ministry said, although witnesses said many of those were applying to join the police force.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for this week's bombings. But analysts said the attacks were almost certainly sponsored by an al-Qaeda affiliate that has rekindled a long-running conflict between the military-backed government and radical Islamist forces.

Algeria has been plagued by civil war and terrorist attacks since the early 1990s, with an estimated 200,000 dead, but until recently suicide bombings were extremely rare. That changed in April 2007, when suicide bombers killed 33 people in synchronized attacks on the Government Palace in Algiers and a suburban police station. More suicide attacks followed, including one last December in which two car bombers destroyed a U.N. office complex and a court building in the capital, killing 41.

Similar attacks on a smaller scale have continued since then. On Aug. 9, eight people were killed when a suicide bomber drove a car into a police station in Zemmouri, a city five miles north of Issers, near the Mediterranean coast. Another suicide car bombing on Aug. 3 wounded 25 people in the nearby city of Tiziouzou. Each of the car bombings this month has occurred in the Kabylie region east of Algiers, home to Algeria's large minority population of ethnic Berbers.

Responsibility for the Aug. 3 attack was asserted by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an umbrella group of Islamist fighters from across North Africa that was formerly known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat.

"We tell the sons of France and the slaves of America, and their masters, too, that our finger is on the trigger and the convoys of martyrs are longing to rampage your bastions in defense of our Islamic nation," the group said in a statement posted afterwards on the Internet. Algeria is a former French colony that has strengthened ties with the United States since 2001, particularly on counterterrorism.

Algeria had been a major supplier of suicide bombers willing to go to Iraq to target foreign troops and Iraqi civilians opposed to al-Qaeda. But as the number of attacks in Iraq has declined, al-Qaeda has become more successful at persuading recruits to stay home and carry out operations on Algerian soil.

"There's really very little doubt that they've been successful at that," said Isabelle Werenfels, a North Africa specialist at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin.

Analysts said the bombings are a sign that al-Qaeda's wing in North Africa has become stronger overall, although Algerian authorities have characterized the violence as the last gasp of a weakened insurgency.

During a visit to the scene of Tuesday's bombing, Interior Minister Noureddine Yazid Zerhouni reiterated the government's "commitment to carry on the fight against the criminal hordes until their elimination," according to the Algerian Press Service.

In Washington, U.S. officials condemned Tuesday's attack.

"We support the government of Algeria as best we can in trying to fight this," State Department spokesman Robert Wood told reporters. "It's another reminder of how terrorism can hit you any place, anytime, anywhere."

© 2008 The Washington Post Company