Algerian authorities have claimed Islamic militants carried out the murder of 19 people, including 11 children, after dark on Sunday in western Algeria, in the worst massacre since Ramadan began a week ago.
Dazed survivors, relating gruesome details of the slaughter, said about 30 rebels stormed Zmala hamlet in the town of Khemis Miliana, 130 km south-west of Algiers, and embarked on a two-hour orgy of killing.
"Nineteen people were killed by having their throats cut, and three others wounded," a senior official at Ain Defla hospital said. The bodies of the victims - 11 children, three women and five men - were brought to the hospital.
Witnesses said that attackers slit the throats of their victims while distracting security forces with a mortar attack at the same time in another neighbourhood.
A witness said attackers firing home-made mortars masked the explosion from a bomb attack against a Zmala home, whose injured owner managed to reach the town centre and sound the alert.
"The terrorists split into two groups. While one fired 15 mortar rounds on the Souffay neighbourhood, another attacked Zmala, 4 or 5 km from there," a witness said. "I was performing the Taraouih [Ramadan] prayer at my home when I heard two explosions. Like many others, I first thought they were bombs because that's the first time we've come under mortar attack," he said. The mortars landed about 30 metres from his house.
Newspapers in Algiers said between 10 and 26 people were injured by the mortars. Witnesses said the shells lightly wounded about 20 people.
Security forces used helicopters to search for the attackers in the Merouana hills around the town.
The latest attacks, which bring the toll to 32 people killed since Ramadan began on December 19th, fuelled fears of a repetition of the massacres during Ramadan last year, when over 1,200 people were killed in Algeria.
Tens of thousands of people have died, most of them civilians, in a spiral of violence that began in 1992 with the cancellation of elections that the now-banned Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was poised to win.
Reuters reports:
The Islamic Salvation Front yesterday threw its weight behind the forthcoming Algerian presidential election and pledged to play a large part in the campaign.
The vote has been set for April following a surprise decision by the President, Mr Liamine Zeroual, to stand down.
"We will work towards making these [elections] a genuine beginning of a just and global political solution in the context of national reconciliation and of a return to peace and security in the country . . . " the FIS foreign co-ordinating council said in a statement released in France. It urged Algerians to choose carefully a man capable of restoring unity.