Islamic Salvation Front

The Algerian government Thursday released final results of Tuesday's first multi-party elections since independence from France and officially declared the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front the winner. Interior Minister Mohammed Salah Mohammedi said the fundamentalists received 55% of the municipal vote while the governing National Liberation Front garnered 31.64%. The third-ranked party was the Rally for Culture and Democracy, which received 5.65%.

The former head of an Algerian militant group that played a key role in the country's bloody insurgency announced plans Saturday to form a political party. Madani Mezrag, who was commander of the Islamic Salvation Army in the 1990s, said in a statement that he would mobilize supporters from across the country for a national congress to launch the new party.

Two men armed with silencer-equipped submachine guns burst into a Paris mosque Tuesday and assassinated an elderly religious leader and Algerian opposition figure, casting new doubts on recent talk of a peace settlement in that war-torn North African nation. Abdelbaki Sahraoui, a Muslim imam and co-founder of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), was shot in the head, police said; another person who tried to stop the attack was also killed. The gunmen then fled.

Islamic militants killed 11 nomads, including children, with knives before burning their tents at their campground, an Algerian newspaper reported. The Arabic-language daily Essahafa said today that an unidentified group of militants carried out the attack Thursday near Laghouat, 280 miles south of Algiers. The Liberte daily reported today that, in a separate incident, 16 members of an Islamic militant group were killed Thursday near Chlef, a town about 150 miles west of Algiers.

Ten days ago, in Algiers' modern seafront Ibn Khaldoun Hall, the Middle East passed a little-noticed milestone. Mohammed Salah Mohamedi, Algeria's soft-spoken, graying interior minister, revealed the stunning news. It took only three minutes. The country's first multiparty election since independence from France 28 years ago, he announced solemnly, had been swept by Islamic fundamentalists. Then he walked out, leaving behind a thunderstruck crowd.

It was the first Friday prayer day for the Muslim faithful of Algiers since the assassination of the country's leader, Mohammed Boudiaf. In one corner of a densely inhabited, deteriorating housing project known unromantically as the Batiment Troisieme Groupe, or Third Group Building, a few older men prayed inside the small Omar Ibn Khatab mosque.

Tens of thousands of Muslim fundamentalists marched to the presidential palace in Algiers to demand the dissolution of Parliament, the release of political prisoners and an end to government control of the media, witnesses said. The demonstration was called by the Iranian-supported Islamic Salvation Front.

A truck bomb killed six people and injured at least 80, and gunmen shot to death a foreigner Saturday as Muslim fundamentalist insurgents sought to derail Algeria's planned presidential elections. Extremists also threatened public employees who don't quit before Sept. 15, and a leader of the banned Islamic Salvation Front was quoted as saying the Nov. 16 vote "will only aggravate the crisis."

A prominent leader of Algeria's outlawed Islamic Salvation Front who opposed the government but had spoken out for peace and reconciliation was slain as he was leaving a dental clinic in Algiers. Abdelkader Hachani, 43, was shot twice in the head and once in the chest by an unknown assailant, according to news service reports and a statement on state-run radio.

Algerian Prime Minister Mouloud Hamrouche, appointed a week ago to speed democratic reforms, replaced all but three ministers in forming a new Cabinet, the official news agency APS said. Former Finance Minister Sid Ahmed Ghezali was named foreign minister, replacing Boualem Bessaieh, the Algerian member of an Arab League committee that has been attempting to forge a peace plan to end Lebanon's 14-year civil war.

A prominent leader of Algeria's outlawed Islamic Salvation Front who opposed the government but had spoken out for peace and reconciliation was slain as he was leaving a dental clinic in Algiers. Abdelkader Hachani, 43, was shot twice in the head and once in the chest by an unknown assailant, according to news service reports and a statement on state-run radio.

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.

Capping a week of surprise gestures aimed at easing the bloody divisions in Algeria, the government of President Liamine Zeroual on Tuesday released from prison the founder of the country's banned Islamic Salvation Front. Abassi Madani, jailed since June 1991, walked out of Algiers' Seradji prison "on parole" after serving six years of a 12-year sentence.

After 60,000 deaths and five years of terror that followed the cancellation of the last general election, the exhausted people of Algeria are trying again today to choose the country's first multi-party parliament. Expectations for a problem-free vote are not high in this capital, where the thud of a midday bomb no longer elicits a serious pause in the luncheon conversation and visiting journalists are routinely furnished with a trio of gunmen to take to interviews as "protection."

Defying threats of violence by Islamic extremists who have waged a fierce four-year insurrection, Algerian voters Thursday approved constitutional changes that will give their president greater powers and outlaw political parties based on religion, language or ethnicity. The vote represented the latest attempt by Algeria's ruling regime to steer the country toward normalcy after a civil war that has claimed about 60,000 lives since 1992.

They killed two of her three brothers and her mother, a pious 55-year-old who made her living packing eggs into cartons. Now, the killers want Houria Zaidat too. The death threat came signed in blood. The message, scrawled in pencil, explained why the 23-year-old woman from Algiers' working-class suburb of Harraga, barely 5-foot-3 but the country's female judo champion since 1992, could no longer be allowed to live. "Death to those women who do not wear the veil," it said.

Thousands of marchers in Algiers condemned the bloodshed that has claimed an estimated 30,000 lives in a 3-year-old conflict between Algerian authorities and Muslim fundamentalists. But as up to 10,000 protesters chanted "No to terrorism," a newspaper published a warning from the Islamic Salvation Army, or AIS, that more killings were planned for February, coinciding with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Tanks and troops headed toward the Islamic stronghold of Bab el Oued in Algiers late Tuesday after a day of violent clashes between fundamentalists and security forces that were sparked by the removal of Islamic symbols from public buildings. Hundreds of fundamentalists, eyes streaming from tear gas, battled with security forces for more than five hours in the most serious clashes since a state of siege was imposed three weeks ago.

A truck bomb killed six people and injured at least 80, and gunmen shot to death a foreigner Saturday as Muslim fundamentalist insurgents sought to derail Algeria's planned presidential elections. Extremists also threatened public employees who don't quit before Sept. 15, and a leader of the banned Islamic Salvation Front was quoted as saying the Nov. 16 vote "will only aggravate the crisis."

Two men armed with silencer-equipped submachine guns burst into a Paris mosque Tuesday and assassinated an elderly religious leader and Algerian opposition figure, casting new doubts on recent talk of a peace settlement in that war-torn North African nation. Abdelbaki Sahraoui, a Muslim imam and co-founder of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), was shot in the head, police said; another person who tried to stop the attack was also killed. The gunmen then fled.