The assassination of the moderate Islamist leader, Mr Abdelka der Hachani, in Algiers yesterday represents a serious blow to hopes for a negotiated settlement in Algeria.
Mr Hachani (43) was shot in the head and chest by a lone gunman as he sat in the waiting room of a dental clinic in the poor neighbourhood of Bab El Oued. He was taken unconscious to the Maillot hospital, where he died later. He is survived by his wife and two sons.
After nearly eight years of civil war and more than 100,000 deaths, a semblance of normality had returned to the capital. More than 500 people have been killed outside Algiers since President Abdelaziz Bouteflika announced a "law on civil concord" last July, yet Algiers was so calm that the president of France was considering a visit.
An open-minded, cultivated petrochemical engineer who spoke fluent French as well as Arabic, Mr Hachani was the leader of the "Djazaarist" faction of Algerian fundamentalists. It was he who decided that the now banned Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) should come to power by winning elections, not through armed rebellion. When the top two FIS leaders, Mr Abassi Madani and Mr Ali Belhadj, were imprisoned in June 1991, Mr Hachani ran the movement in their place, leading it to a landslide victory in elections in December 1991.
The following month, after the army cancelled the election, Mr Hachani published a statement in El Khabar newspaper calling on conscripts to "preserve the unity of the country, its security and stability . . . by abandoning a junta undermined by the spirit of domination and dictatorship over the people".
He was arrested in January 1992, and spent 5 1/2 years in Ser kadji prison, where he survived harsh physical treatment and an attempted jailbreak in which nearly 100 prisoners were massacred. When Mr Hachani was freed in July 1997, he proceeded to negotiate a truce between the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS) and the Algerian army.
The ceasefire has held for most of the past two years, but the "Salafist" Algerian Islamists represented by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) continued to attack civilians and security forces whom they regard as accomplices of an "infidel" regime.
Mr Hachani opposed Mr Bouteflika's amnesty law in July on the grounds that his two superiors in the FIS had not been pardoned and because the measure did not go far enough in encouraging rebels to lay down their arms, yet he remained the main link between the regime and the guerrillas. He was assassinated by someone determined to halt attempts to stop the civil war. Were his killers from the intelligence services, the military or the fundamentalists?
