ARMED extremists killed 31 people, mainly civilians, in two separate massacres overnight in the Tiaret region of western Algeria, officials said on Thursday.
Twenty people were killed and five wounded in one attack at Ksar Chellala, while a further 11 people were killed in Sidi Khaled, on the outskirts of the town of Tiaret itself, some 340 kilometres west of Algiers, the officials said, without giving further details.
The attacks came as the north African country begins gearing up for legislative elections on May 30.
The first massacre represents the biggest single civilian death toll in extremist violence in Algeria this year.
Sixteen people, among them eight children and four women, were killed last week at Feidja, also in the Tiaret region, which has seen an upsurge in violence in recent weeks.
The hardline Armed Islamic Group (GIA), one of two main movements fighting the secular government, is known to operate in the region.
The GIA has stepped up its attacks since appointing a new leader in March after security forces killed longtime leader Antar Zouabri in a gunbattle on February 8.
The GIA’s new national emir, Rachid Abou Tourab, said in a statement shortly after his appointment that he would pursue the movement’s radical policies until Algeria was an Islamic state.
There would be, he said, ”neither truce, nor dialogue, nor reconciliation, nor security, but blood, blood, destruction, destruction.”
Nearly 130 people have been killed in violence in Algeria since the beginning of April, according to a toll compiled from press reports and official sources.
Since the beginning of the year, more than 450 people, among them about 150 Islamic fundamentalists, have been killed in the violence.
Algeria’s brutal civil war has claimed some 150 000 lives since 1992, according to the press and political parties.
Thousands of fighters surrendered under an amnesty programme in 1999, but the GIA and another hardline force, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, reject a reconciliation policy proposed by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to end a decade of Muslim extremist insurgency. – AFP
