ALGIERS (Reuters) - Anti-government protesters attacked public buildings and looted shops in Algeria on Sunday in the latest flare-up of a widening popular uprising that is challenging the rule of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.
The unrest has prompted the United States and the European Union to urge the North African country's military-dominated authorities to act quickly to end the two-month-old unrest.
In the troubled Berber-speaking region of Kabylie, where protests began in April, stone-throwing rioters took to the streets on Sunday, torching public buildings and ransacking shops, residents said.
In the coastal city of Bejaia, 145 miles east of Algiers, residents said protesters burned a six-story building belonging to the police after its occupants evacuated it.
All land telephone communications with the city were cut off after rioters torched the telephone exchange building of local company Actel. A tire warehouse of state-owned company Naftal was reduced to ashes. Security forces took up positions around the governor's headquarters and a gendarmerie barracks after the buildings were targeted by rioters.
Similar disturbances erupted in Tizi Ouzou, the other main city in Kabylie, 55 miles from Algiers, where demonstrators erected barricades and clashed with police, residents said.
In the major eastern port of Annaba, 370 miles east of Algiers, hundreds of youths tried to loot shops they said belonged to army generals.
``The clashes sometimes turned into open confrontation with inhabitants who were protesting the looting,'' one resident said.
BOY CRUSHED TO DEATH
A 13-year-old boy was crushed to death by a heavy metal table on Saturday in Annaba as hundreds of protesters looted a domestic appliances shop, the daily newspaper El Watan said.
New flashpoints appeared on the already long list of towns and villages hit by the growing unrest.
In Guelma, southwest of Annaba, residents said stone-throwing demonstrators smashed windows of public buildings and pulled down lamp posts. Riot police fired tear gas to disperse them.
Three villages near Setif, 190 miles east of Algiers, were the scenes of similar clashes between protesters and police in which five demonstrators were wounded.
There have been almost daily protests for the past two months against a police crackdown on riots in Kabylie that left at least 52 people dead, shot by security forces.
The riots in Kabylie were sparked by the death of a teenager in police custody on April 18.
But the discontent, rooted in perceived discrimination against minority Berbers -- who lived in North Africa before the seventh century Arab invasion -- has mushroomed into broad resentment over unemployment and social conditions.
Tensions came to a head last Thursday when a riot erupted during a pro-democracy march by ethnic Berbers in Algiers which organizers said drew up to one million people.
The authorities said two journalists were killed and 946 people wounded in the riot, but independent media put the death toll at six.
All 335 people arrested during Thursday's disturbances, including 26 minors, were released on Saturday, the official APS news agency said. Algerian Interior Minister Noureddine Zerhouni had announced their release earlier as a goodwill gesture.