After an absence of 10 years, the Miss Algeria beauty contest is to resume on Friday in the western city of Oran, organizers said.

A total of 20 women aged between 18 and 26 have been carefully selected from Algeria's main cities to line up for the beauty pageant, co-organizer and jury member Hamza Ameziane told Agence France Presse on Wednesday.

Publication of the first images of convalescing Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika in a Paris hospital has failed to reassure the country's media, with many commenting Thursday on his weak health.

"Bouteflika greatly weakened by the illness," ran the headline of French-language daily El Watan.

Algeria's prime minister and army chief of staff on Tuesday visited President Abdelaziz Bouteflika at the hospital in Paris where he is convalescing after suffering a mini-stroke, state television announced.

"Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal and the Chief of Staff of the people's national army Ahmed Gaid Salah paid a visit to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika at the Institution des Invalides in Paris," the broadcaster said.

A father of Algeria's independence has urged the army to end the country's leadership crisis, calling ailing and incapacitated President Abdelaziz Bouteflika a despot who had been "elected and re-elected" by the military.

In a letter published on Tuesday, Mohamed Mechati did not go so far as to say the army should oust Bouteflika, hospitalized in France since April, but said "your courage and your patriotism... requires that you act swiftly for the survival of our country."

Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan left Morocco for Algeria on Tuesday, the second leg of a North African tour, as the worst political crisis of his 10 years in power showed no sign of abating.

After arriving on Monday at the head of a senior ministerial delegation and accompanied by a large number of businessmen, he and Moroccan counterpart Abdelilah Benkirane signed a joint political declaration on developing strategic ties, official Moroccan media said.

Tunisian soldiers accidentally shot dead a colleague during an operation targeting an al-Qaida-linked jihadist group in the country's western border region, the interior ministry said on Monday.

"The army set a trap for the terrorist elements but a soldier left his position and his comrades told him to stop, believing that he was a terrorist, before opening fire," ministry spokesman Mokhtar Ben Nasr said.

An Algiers criminal court has sentenced to 12 years in jail a doctor accused of kidnapping Algerian children born to single mothers and selling them for adoption in France.

Khelifa Hanouti, accused of illegally shipping the children abroad with the help of a notary, must also pay a fine of a million dinars (10,000 euros), the court ruled late on Monday.

Thirteen people, including dual nationality French-Algerians, went on trial in Algiers on Monday accused of kidnapping Algerian children and selling them for adoption in France.

The case first emerged in 2009 and the prosecution alleges the defendants kidnapped an unknown number of children and transported them to the French city of Saint-Etienne, where they were adopted for a fee.

The jihadist group led by Algerian Mokhtar Belmokhtar that claimed twin suicide car bombings in Niger that killed at least 20 people threatened on Friday to launch further attacks in the country.

"We will launch further operations" in Niger, the group said in a statement posted on Islamist Internet forums that also threatened France and countries involved militarily in battling Islamist extremists in Mali.

Hospitalized Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika is recovering well in Paris and will return home soon, Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci said on Wednesday.

"The president is in good health; he will return soon to Algeria. For the moment he is still in France for a few days of recovery," Medelci told Radio France Internationale (RFI).