"We heard about the disappearance of the plane on television". In French airports where some passengers of the missing Air Algerie flight were due to end their trip, relatives desperately waited for news of their loved ones.

Flight AH5017, which took off in Ouagadougou and was bound for Algiers, disappeared in the early morning over Mali with at least 116 passengers and crew on board, including around 50 French nationals -- some of whom were transiting through the Algerian capital on their way to France.

The American embassy in Algiers has warned of a possible attack by "an unspecified terrorist group" over the weekend and advised its staff to avoid U.S.-operated hotels.

"As of June 2014 an unspecified terrorist group may have been considering attacks in Algiers, possibly in the vicinity of a U.S. branded hotel," the mission said on its website.

Gunmen killed 11 Algerian soldiers in an ambush overnight, the defense ministry said on Sunday, in the first attack of its kind since President Abdelaziz Bouteflika won a fourth term.

The attack took place in the restive Kabylie region east of Algiers, where discontent with the ailing 77-year-old Bouteflika was most evident during the presidential election.

A protest group, founded just two months ago when ailing Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika controversially decided to seek re-election, has livened up a lackluster campaign from which the incumbent has been entirely absent.

Activists of the Barakat (Enough) movement have made their mark by daring to argue publicly that the 77-year-old Bouteflika, who is too sick to take to the campaign trail himself, is unfit to govern.

At least 35 people, including 17 police, have been wounded in renewed clashes between Arabs and Berbers in the southern Algerian town of Ghardaia, a medical source told Agence France Presse on Monday.

The wounded were taken to hospital after the latest round of fighting broke out late Saturday, said Abdelbaki Bouhafs, a health official in the town, 600 kilometers (370 miles) south of Algiers, on the edge of the Sahara desert.

Algerian private television channel Al Atlas TV, which has strongly criticized the government, said on Wednesday that it had been ordered to stop broadcasting after police raided its headquarters.

Al Atlas information director Ghoul Hafnaoui told Agence France Presse that the satellite channel went off the air in mid morning, "under orders from the authorities," a day after police searched its premises and seized equipment.

The Algerian army killed four armed Islamists overnight in an ambush south of the capital, the defense ministry announced Thursday.

"During an operation carried out by a unit of the ANP (Algerian army)... four terrorists were eliminated at around midnight, during an ambush" on a road near Berrouaghia, in the Medea region, 120 kilometers (75 miles) south of Algiers, the ministry said.

At least two of four Islamists killed by security forces in a raid southeast of Algeria's capital were members of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), press reports said Sunday.

The four were aboard a vehicle ambushed in the town of Sour El-Ghozlane some 100 kilometers (60 miles) southeast of Algiers, reported Le Soir d'Algerie, citing reliable security sources.

President Michel Suleiman said Wednesday that rival leaders should adopt an electoral vote law that is consistent with the Taef accord away from political confessionalism.

MPs should “find a law that is consistent with the Taef and does not take back (the country) to sectarian laws,” Suleiman told Lebanese expatriates in Senegal on the second day of his visit to the West African country before heading to the Ivory Coast on Thursday.

A top U.S. intelligence official had talks in Algiers Saturday ahead of a regional security conference, the official APS news agency reported.

Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers discussed the security situation and U.S.-Algerian cooperation in the fight against terrorism and organized crime with Interior Minister Daho Ould Kablia, it said, quoting a ministry statement.