Algeria Revolts

Three bombs exploded in and around this capital Thursday, killing two people and injuring 28 others, Algerian security forces said. The attacks came as a European Union delegation wrapped up a peace mission to the insurgency-racked North African country. It was not immediately clear whether the bombings were connected to each other, nor if they were linked to the peace mission.

Armed men killed 32 people in three weekend attacks, including 17 people whose throats were slit, security forces said. No one claimed responsibility for the attacks, but authorities lay the blame for violence racking Algeria on Islamic insurgents trying to topple the military-backed regime. A statement by the security forces, read on state-run radio, said armed men slit the throats of 17 people early Sunday near Saida, 275 miles southwest of Algiers.

Armed groups attacked two Algerian villages, killing at least 30 people and wounding 70 others, hospital sources said Monday. The attackers fired mortar shells and bombs Sunday night on Khemis Miliana, a town about 50 miles west of the capital, Algiers. Fifteen people died and 40 were injured, said the sources. The bombardment struck a school and several homes, the newspaper Le Matin reported.

An armed band killed 45 people in a predawn attack Wednesday that was the bloodiest massacre in Algeria in months, security forces said. Separately, authorities said Wednesday that they had pulled 46 bodies from a 180-foot-deep well used as a mass grave in Meftah, 15 miles south of central Algiers. Many more victims remain in the mass grave, which could be up to 2 years old. Security forces blamed Wednesday's massacre in Tadjena, about 125 miles west of Algiers, on Muslim insurgents.

A bomb thrown at a passing bus exploded in a crowded street in central Algiers, the capital, injuring 12 people, six of them seriously, security forces said. No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but a police official said the bomb was similar to those made by Islamic militants. The device hit a bus window and rebounded onto the pavement. Attacks on civilians and government targets are aimed at destabilizing the military-backed regime and creating a state based on Muslim law.

After a shootout and a 12-hour standoff, police arrested seven Algerians suspected of belonging to an Islamic militant group blamed for massacres in Algeria and bombings in France. Six of the suspects were arrested in a raid on a row house in a rundown Brussels district inhabited by North African immigrants. The two sides exchanged gunfire during the raid.

Suspected Muslim rebels killed 58 civilians in Algeria in two separate massacres Thursday night, officials and medical sources said Friday. The official Algerian Press Service said that 47 people were massacred in the Djelfa area and that 11 were killed in Saida province. APS also reported six "terrorists" killed by security forces in clashes in Mascara province Thursday night.

A British newspaper said Sunday that it had unearthed fresh evidence that some of the massacres in Algeria were the work of military security forces. The Observer quoted two Algerian police officers seeking asylum in Britain as saying that, under orders, they took part in the slaughter and torture of civilians. "I have done everything: murder, torture. If you cut someone's throat in front of me right now, I would say that is normal, normal," one of the former officers was quoted as saying.

Three low-ranking European government ministers wrapped up a one-day visit to Algeria on Tuesday, a gesture of solidarity to express the world's shock and alarm over the violence there that has killed more than 65,000 people. But even before they departed the North African country, the Europeans admitted that their fact-finding mission had not led to any concrete steps to ease the suffering of Algeria's terrorized communities.

New reports emerged Tuesday of more grisly massacres in Algeria, including the mass burning of residents in one remote western village--a wave of killing that seemed certain to add to mounting international pressure for an independent inquiry into the slaughter. Almost 1,000 deaths have been reported in Algeria in the first week of Ramadan, the holy month of fasting for Muslims. The toll makes this year's Ramadan easily the bloodiest in six years of insurgency by anti-government radicals.