AN Islamic fundamentalist group slit the throats of 19 people, including five young sisters, in separate attacks on two villages south of Algiers, witnesses said yesterday. The weekend killings are the latest in a litany of horrific murders in outlying Algerian villages.
Operations by the security forces - once the prime target of the terror campaign - have brought the fight to Islamist strongholds, prompting the anti government forces to seek more vulnerable prey. Hundreds of villagers, despairing at arrangements by security forces and local militias to protect them, have fled their homes.
Throat slitting has become the terrorists' trademark, and the weekend atrocities bore the usual blood curdling features. Fourteen people, including women, teenagers and an old man, were massacred in one attack in Bouinan, near Blida, the security services said. Some of the victims had been decapitated, they added.
"They came at three o'clock in the morning, and began with the first house in the upper part of the village," one local person said. "It seemed that they wanted in particular to kill an old man who lives in a house further down and who kept petrol bombs on his terrace to protect himself in case of attack."
Five girls who had their throats cut in the village of Ouled Chebel, a few kilometres away, on Saturday were from the same family, witnesses said.
The neighbouring villages are in the Mitidja region, a stronghold of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), regarded as the most radical of the fundamentalist groups.
The GIA has increased its attacks on the local population since early November, killing an estimated 106 people in the Blida region alone.
Libyan state television reported that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) has asked the Libyan leader, Col Gadafy, to mediate in talks with the Algerian government aimed at putting an end to a seemingly endless litany of bloodshed.
Libya has been a bitter opponent of Islamic fundamentalist groups in the Arab world, including FIS, which Col Gadafy in 1995 denounced as "charlatans and imposters who exploit the poor".