Algerians awoke yesterday to the image of a bloodied, severed head and a horrifying story of live infants dismembered before the eyes of their parents. Newspapers were again dominated by accounts of the unending carnage and conflicting assessments of how the authorities were coping with the crisis.
The Prime Minister, Mr Ahmed Ouyahia, insisted that Islamist "terrorists" were beaten, but that more attacks were likely as long as they could hope for support from "networks" allegedly working with impunity in Europe.
One daily displayed a photograph of the severed head of an Algiers bomber blown to pieces by his own device. Another quoted a young woman abducted by Islamist extremists who had massacred 120 villagers and then beheaded five of 18 female prisoners who could not keep up with the flight back to remote mountain hideouts.
The women are taken for sex, then killed. Le Matin said Sonja, aged 22, escaped and directed anti-terrorist forces to an underground base where they killed 15 gunmen and found one woman buried alive and three with their throats freshly slashed.
From a district in the west, one daily described the "enormous need for humanitarian aid" among poverty-stricken peasants driven from their villages, belying the government's insistence that all victims were adequately provided for.
Early yesterday morning, Mr Ouyahia told a groggy session of the National Assembly that while Islamists had "lost the war at home," the terror was not over.
Giving the first official cumulative death toll for six years of internal mayhem, Mr Ouyahia said 26,536 civilians and members of the security forces had been killed since January 1992, when Algeria's secular authorities scrapped an election which the Islamic fundamentalist movement was poised to win. Independent estimates are 65,000 to 80,000 killed, but it was not clear whether Mr Ouyahia was including casualties among the outlawed armed gangs.
The premier, wreathed in clouds of cigarette smoke, insisted in the face of a barrage of sceptical questions that the situation was improving. Liberte considered this a distortion, "if not a dangerous travesty". "Ouyahia fails to convince MPs," reported La Tribune.
On Tuesday night, that paper reported, a dozen "terrorists" cut off the arms and legs of four toddlers and then slashed their throats as their parents watched helplessly before being killed in their turn.
Liberte said seven Muslim rebels were killed in an ambush by the army on Wednesday about 60km (40 miles) east of Algiers.
"There is a clear failure to protect a population in danger," said Mr Ali Rachedi of the opposition Socialist Front (FFS). The party called for "an international commission of inquiry to throw light on the massacres."
The FFS also called on the European Union to help mediate. Both demands have been rejected time and again by the Algerian authorities.