SURVIVORS of Algeria's worst massacre in five years of slaughter gave details yesterday of how Islamist rebels mercilessly hacked and shot 93 people to death in a nightlong bloodbath. Nearly half the dead were women and young girls.
Their throats were cut, heads hacked off and others shot in an orgy of savagery, 25 km from the capital, Algiers, that ended only as dawn approached on Tuesday.
"When they left, I got up. And there in the yard was only blood, bloodied bodies and heads everywhere. I fainted," said Radia (14), who had pretended to be dead as her whole family was slaughtered.
Witnesses quoted by Algerian newspapers said between 40 and 50 men took part in the raid on an isolated farming community, Haouch Boughlef Khemisti, in Bougara district.
"A bomb explosion woke us... Some minutes later they started dragging us to the centre of the village where they began cutting people's throats," Houria (33) said.
"One held my head and another my clothes and they sliced my throat quickly. I fainted... One of them came and kicked me to see if I was really dead," she said in her account in the newspaperAlKhabar. "My husband was killed, his throat cut."
The government described the massacre as one of unprecedented savagery and said the killers, some of whom had been shot by intervening security forces, were being hunted down.
The Prime Minister, Mr Ahmed Ouyahia, vowed that terrorism would be eliminated.
"This is a savage act such as mankind has never before witnessed... This crime once again strips the mask from the reality of terrorism in this country," he said.
The latest massacre, in which three children aged nine months to four years were killed, brought to nearly 300 those killed in the past few weeks in similar raids.
It coincided with the deadline for candidates to register for the first parliamentary elections since authorities in January 1992 cancelled a general election in which Muslim fundamentalists had taken a commanding lead. The country subsequently plunged into the violence in which about 60,000 people have since died.
One diplomatic source in the capital, Algiers, said the violence seemed to have increased since the June 5th election date was announced, but there was no hard evidence to link the massacres to the political process.
The government newspaper El Moadiahid appeared to suggest a political motive: "On the eve of each political perspective which involves the destiny of our citizens, terrorist factions sadly show themselves, to carry out abject assassinations against innocent victims...
On Tuesday, the bodies were taken to the canteen of the local school, as heavy earthmovers dug graves in the cemetery. Hundreds of people from the area attended the funerals.
Yesterday 25 wounded who had survived lay in hospital, 18 still in a serious state. One survivor who saw the attackers cut off his brother's head, asked: "My God, why us?"