Algiers | Monday
Some 500 knife-wielding religious extremists carried out a “punitive expedition” against suspected prostitutes in central Algeria, slashing about 20 women, while elsewhere in the violence-wracked country a massacre of 11 people was reported on Sunday.
The attack on women living alone in poor districts of Hassi Messaoud, a major oil centre some 800km southeast of Algiers, took place on Friday and was “prepared” during a sermon at the city’s main mosque, Sunday newspapers reported.
The papers said the women, some of them widows with small children, had come to the city where many foreign oil workers live from the north in search of employment and were working as domestic servants.
In the sermon they were accused of having “loose morals.”
The attack left about 20 of the women with cuts to their faces.
Some women were molested during the attack, the reports said, adding that several of the assailants were arrested.
Prostitution is illegal but tolerated in Algeria, where the military prevented Islamic fundamentalists from being elected to power in 1992, sparking the country’s long-running civil war.
That conflict saw 11 people killed and five wounded in an attack near Algiers overnight, security services said on Sunday.
The attack occurred in Hameur el Ain, near Tipaza, some 70km west of the capital.
The security services said in a statement the attack was carried out by “a group of terrorists,” the term normally used to refer to armed Islamic extremists.
The statement, which gave no details of the victims or the circumstances of the massacre, said an “intense search operation was immediately launched by the security services against the perpetrators of this criminal attack.”
After two months of relative calm, Algeria has seen a renewed spate of violence attributed to Islamic militants, in which some 44 people have been killed in the last 10 days.
The surge in attacks by Islamic extremists comes amid a separate wave of bloody protests and riots in the Berber region of Kabylie and other parts of northeastern Algeria, in which more than 60 people have died and more than 2_000 have been injured since late April.
Sunday newspapers reported rioting in several cities.
In one incident on Saturday, religious fanatics opposed to a discotheque in Ain Tagrout, some 230km east of Algiers, barricaded the national highway with burning tires.
The owner of the discotheque had fired on the protesters, who were dispersed by gendarmes, the press reports said.
Rioting also erupted in El Hamma, some 400km east of Algiers, where youths demanded the release of municipal officials who had been arrested for mismanagement.
Elsewhere in the northeast, in El-Tarf, residents set up barricades to protest what they view as arbitrary housing allocations, the El Khabar newspaper reported.
In other unrest, protesters took to the streets in Kef Laarous, some 450km southeast of Algiers, to protest against a longstanding water shortage. -AFP