Reports from Algeria say at least nine people have been killed -- several of them children -- in two attacks at the weekend blamed on Islamic militants.

Press reports said at least five members of the same family were knifed and shot in the Medea region, about eighty kilometres south of Algiers.

In the other incident, four people died at Laghouat, four-hundred kilometres south of the capital.

It's estimated that more than one-hundred thousand people have been killed in political violence since 1992. A delegation from the media pressure group Reporters sans Frontieres arrived in Algeria yesterday to draw attention to the fate of five journalists who disappeared in the mid-nineteen nineties.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service