Algerian police beat tens of young people with batons as they protested outside parliament on Sunday about a lack of job security, and arrested several, an opposition MP said.

"This morning, almost 200 young people gathered peacefully outside parliament to make MPs aware of their difficult situation. Police beat them with their batons and arrested seven of them," said Ahmed Betatache, head of the opposition Socialist Forces Front (FFS).

Two Islamists accused of killing 500 people during Algeria's civil war, including the rape and murder of 60 women, were sentenced to death on Sunday, Agence France Press reported.

The judge sentenced Djilali Kouri, 32, and Antar Ali, 35, to death for "founding and running a terrorist group that killed and spread terror among the population and that murdered hundreds of civilians and soldiers" between 1996 and 2004.

Tunisian security forces were on Thursday hunting two armed jihadist groups near the Algerian border, one in the Mount Chaambi region and the other in Kef further north, the interior ministry said.

"There are two groups, one of about 15 to 20 people in Mount Chaambi... Another group is in the Kef region near the Algerian border," ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui told Agence France Presse.

Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, hospitalised in France at the weekend after suffering a mini-stroke, reassured Algerians on Tuesday about the state of his health, national media reported.

"It is very difficult for me, when I find myself in hospital abroad, not to be beside the Algerian people to celebrate Labour Day and attend the finals of the Algerian football cup and military football cup," he was quoted as saying by the APS news agency.

The health problems of Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who suffered a mini-stroke at the weekend, have intensified speculation about who might succeed him one year ahead of presidential elections.

His hospitalization in France, coming amid press reports of corruption scandals implicating members of his family, have undermined speculation about the 76-year-old president running for a fourth term.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, hospitalized in France after suffering a mini-stroke, is in good health and will return to Algeria within a week, his doctor was quoted as saying Monday.

"The president is in very good health... He will come back to Algeria in several days... in not more than seven days," Rachid Bougherbal told the Algerian daily Ennahar, after speaking to Bouteflika on Sunday morning.

Three Algerian auxiliary policemen were killed Sunday in what a security official called a "terrorist" attack, a term authorities use to refer to armed Islamists, the APS news agency said.

The three had just quit work in the Tipaza region some 70 kilometers (45 miles) west of the capital Algiers and were going home when the attack occurred, the unnamed official told APS, declining to give further details.

The state of health of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, flown to hospital in Paris after suffering a stroke, raises "no worries," the premier's office said Sunday in a statement cited by national news agency APS.

"Following the transient ischaemia without consequences which the president of the republic... suffered yesterday (Saturday), additional medical tests at Val-de-Grace hospital in Paris have confirmed that his state of health raises no worries," it said.

Spanish police on Tuesday arrested two "suspected terrorists" believed to be linked to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, Spain's interior ministry said.

Officers "today detained two suspected terrorists of al-Qaida in Murcia and Zaragoza," with help from the French and Moroccan police, it said.

Algeria's former head of state Ali Kafi, who was appointed after president Mohamed Boudiaf's assassination in 1992 and held office during a bloody period in the country's civil war, died Tuesday aged 85.

Kafi, an army colonel who headed the military-backed High Committee of the State (HCE) until his replacement by Liamine Zeroual in 1994, died "in Geneva following an illness," the presidency said in a statement.