Guillotine used in reign of terror

THE voice down the telephone line from Algiers quivered with fear and fatigue. I had heard on the morning news of a car bomb in the centre of the city, in the Rue Didouche Mourad, near the university. That's where my friend Leila lives with her ageing mother and I was worried.

"I was walking down the street when it exploded," Leila told me. "The blast knocked me over. I'm all bruised on one side. A few minutes later and I would have been next to the car bomb.

"It was just at the corner, where you turn into my street from the Rue Didouche. It would have killed me. Everything in the house is broken. The grandfather clock is broken."

The words tumbled out, the pauses filled with sobs.

"I took two sleeping pills but I barely slept because I'm so scared. It's cold and, with no glass, I'm afraid they'll climb through the windows.

"Thank God my mother wasn't here. Her bed is covered with broken glass. She's staying with my sister in Boufarik.

"I should get the windows fixed but I don't have the energy. The glazier has quadrupled his prices. Everybody is armed now. I have a gun.

"The Islamists go around in bands of 20 to 50. It doesn't matter if you have an armoured door; they blow it off the hinges. If they come into my flat, at least I'll shoot the first one before they kill me."

My friend fled Algiers once, after she received death threats and was attacked in the street in 1994. For two years she slept on the living room floor of relatives abroad. But she wasn't able to work legally, and renewing residence permits was a constant struggle.

In the end it seemed easier to go back to the cosy first floor apartment in the old French colonial building where she grew up. "If I die, at least I'll be at home," she told me.

Death is ever present to Algerians. The government announced that seven people were killed in Tuesday's car bomb in the capital. Leila believed the real figure was much higher.

"There were at least two traffic cops killed, and a woman I knew from down the street. It was two in the afternoon and the place was packed with buses, pedestrians, cars. It felt like the apocalypse."

The fundamentalists had posted warnings that morning that there would be a bomb in the Rue Didouche, she said. Such threats are so common that no-one pays attention.

"They didn't even show it on the evening [government-run] television news. They mentioned it in passing, as if it were a minor incident."

In the wake of the bombing, the Algerian Prime Minister, Mr Ahmed Ouyahia, condemned the media for "encouraging" such attacks by giving them publicity.

"They should show everything on TV," Leila said angrily. "Then people would lose their fear. They would go after the people who do this and beat them to death with sticks."

Two nights before the car bomb, fundamentalists killed at least 18 civilians at Douaouda, west of the capital.

"A little boy who escaped told about it later," Leila continued. "They have made a guillotine which they drive around on a truck." She spoke again through sobs. "They stuff newspaper in people's mouths, tie their hands and feet and guillotine them in front of everyone."

Leila knows her suffering is far from over. The Muslim holy month of Ramadan began yesterday. On Thursday the authorities stepped up security by sending hundreds more plain-clothes policemen on to the streets. Every year, Algerian fundamentalists step up their attacks during Ramadan, a time they believe propitious for holy war.