THOUSANDS of Algerians, including President Liamine Zeroual and the army chief, Gen Muhammad Lamari, attended the funeral yesterday of the assassinated union leader, Mr Abdelhak Benhamouda, in El Alia martyrs' cemetery on the eastern outskirts of Algiers.
The area was blanketed with heavily armed elite troops and plainclothes police as Mr Benhamouda was buried in the same square of graves as President Muhammad Boudiaf and the former interior minister, Boubaker Belkaid.
Gen Zeroual, Gen Lamari, the Prime Minister, Mr Ahmed Ouyahia, and other officials watched silently as the coffin was lowered into the grave after they repeated verses from the Qu'ran.
Mr Benhamouda, a staunch supporter of Gen Zeroual, was gunned down in central Algiers on Tuesday by four men described by the government as Muslim fundamentalists.
Earlier yesterday, hundreds of mourners paid last respects to Mr Benhamouda. Algerian residents and state run radio said traffic stopped across Algeria at 1 p.m. in response to union calls for a minute's silence.
At the union building where Mr Benhamouda was gunned down, Algerian television showed his coffin draped in the national green and white flag and surrounded by wreaths, his portrait at one end.
Despite the government claim that he was killed by Islamic militants, independent newspapers and many ordinary Algerians asked whether they, or political rivals, were behind the killing.
Mr Benhamouda's last words - "Kamel, my brother, they have betrayed us" - gasped out before he died and reported by an Algerian newspaper, added to the mystery.
His final words, the ambush in central Algiers and the escape in the heavily policed city of the gunmen raised a clamour of questions over his killing and its motives.
Algeria's independent newspapers all asked: "Who killed Benhamouda?", a powerful figure who was preparing to start his own political party.
Liberte asked if he died because he was "the new political man who was preparing... to upset the national chessboard". It asked: "Who killed him, or rather, who ordered his elimination?"
Mr Benhamouda, a vociferous anti Islamist, recently said Algeria's political hierarchy had done nothing to resolve five years of crisis in which some 60,0001 people have been killed. The violence began in 1992 after the authorities cancelled a general election dominated by Islamists. New elections are promised before July.
At El Alia cemetery, reserved for Algeria's martyrs, one woman said simply: "We lost the father of the poor and the defender of workers' rights."