THREE gunmen shot and killed a grassroots activist from Algeria's hawkish anti Islamist Rally for Democracy and Culture (RCD) party in Algiers, an Algerian newspaper reported yesterday.
The attackers gunned down Mr Said Rabhi on Sunday as he was moving off in his car from his home in Kouba, a Muslim guerrilla stronghold on the heights of Algiers, El Watan said.
Mr Rabhi (44) was killed two days after President Liamine Zeroual vowed in a nationwide broadcast that his government would battle to the "final eradication of terrorism", which, he said, was being manipulated by foreigners bent on destabilising Algeria.
More than 200 people have been killed, many having been hacked to death or having had their throats cut in the past two weeks in Algiers and surrounding towns and hamlets, and in a wave of bombings which the authorities blame on Muslim guerrillas.
About 60,000 people have died in the North African country's violence since early 1992 when the authorities cancelled a general election in which radical Islamists had taken a commanding lead.
Algerian telecommunication authorities yesterday acknowledged for the first time that violence had disrupted the Algiers telephone system.
It said "successive acts of vandalism", the official term used to describe Muslim guerrilla sabotage, had caused havoc in the telephone network in the Algiers borough of Hussein Dey.
The capital has experienced sporadic gas and electricity shortages in the past year.
The Algerian government blames Muslim guerrillas for a sabotage campaign which it says has inflicted losses on the economy totalling more than $2 billion.
Political pressure is growing on Gen Zeroual to try to end the increasingly bloody conflict.
However, the French Foreign Minister, Mr Herve de Charette, yesterday rejected an opposition call for a French initiative in Algeria, saying it was a sovereign state that must resolve its own problems.
Speaking in Copenhagen during a visit to Denmark, Mr de Charette was asked for his response to a plea by the French Socialist leader, Mr Lionel Jospin, for France to lead the international community in an effort to restore peace to the former French colony.
"Algeria is an independent country and for the moment we think it is the responsibility of the Algerian people, Algerian leaders, to find solutions to their own problems," Mr de Charette said.