A bomb ripped through an open-air market outside the capital on Algeria's Independence Day Friday, killing at least 30 people and wounding 36 others, the official APS news agency reported. The bomb was hidden in the mouth of a sewer at a market in Larba, about 15 miles southeast of the capital, APS said, quoting a statement from military authorities in the Algiers area. The agency originally reported 29 dead, but a wounded person later died.(Read photo caption)

It could not be immediately determined whether the attack - the deadliest this year - was the work of armed Islamic opposition group. The groups have led a 10-year insurgency to try to topple this North African country's military-backed government.

A Muslim fundamentalist party has killed an estimated 120,000 people since the violence started in 1992 after the army aborted legislative elections to thwart victory.

The attack came as Algerians celebrated the 40th year of their independence from France, won after a brutal seven-year war.

Security had been tightened around the capital ahead of Independence Day.

The Larba area was long a haunt of the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, blamed for most civilian massacres.

Security forces were thought to have largely cleaned out the area around Algiers and the area to the south, the Mitidja Plain, part of which was once controlled by Islamists.

However, violence has recently stepped up in the Algeria, with assailants targeting public transport and isolated hamlets.

The GIA and another movement, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Call, refused an amnesty plan offered by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to bring peace to this tormented nation.

In the past month, 25 people were killed in three separate attacks on buses, one not far from Larba.

More than 750 people have been killed since the start of the year in Algeria, according to an unofficial account by the press.

PHOTO CAPTION

A bomb in a crowded market outside Algiers killed at least 30 people July 5, 2002 and injured many others, hospital and government security sources said. The blast in Larba, about 15 miles south of the capital Algiers, was the worst killing of civilians in a single attack in civil strife-torn Algeria this year they said. (MapInfo, NASA-Visible Earth/Jon Resnick, Reuters Graphic)