The massacres in Algeria can be stopped if the West persuades the government to talk to its Islamic fundamentalist opponents, a leader of the banned Islamic movement, FIS, was quoted yesterday as saying.
Mr Abdelkader Hachani proposed a conference of national reconciliation, without foreign intermediaries, followed by a commission of inquiry into the killings of at least 65,000 people, and international indictments against the perpetrators.
"Only a political dynamic which opens perspectives to the Islamic movement could marginalise these extremists," Mr Hachani, a senior figure in the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), told the Belgian daily La Libre Belgique.
"The West possesses all the instruments to get the authorities to negotiate a just solution with all the representative political forces in the country."
Mr Hachani was described as the number three leader of FIS. His comments were published as an official communique said Islamist guerrillas were suspected of the killing of 103 people and the wounding of 70 in a village south of Algiers.
"One hundred and three people were assassinated and 70 others wounded, including 10 in a serious state, at Sidi Hamed in Blida province by a terrorist group in the night of January 11 and 12, 1998," said a statement by the security forces carried on the official news agency, APS.
Algerian officials use the term "terrorist group" to mean Muslim rebels whom they routinely blame for killings. The violence erupted in early 1992 after the authorities cancelled a general election dominated by Islamic fundamentalists.
French television showed a reporter interviewing shocked survivors outside an Algiers hospital. One woman appealed shrilly: "The French and the Americans must come to rid us of these scum."
Senior European Union diplomats are due to meet in Brussels today to set the date and framework for their first mission to Algeria to discuss the wave of massacres, in which more than 1,000 people have died since the end of December alone.