France mourned seven Trappist monks said to have been killed by Algerian Moslem guerrillas, but the Algiers government said on Saturday it could not confirm or deny their deaths.
An interior ministry statement carried by Algeria’s official news agency APS said: “The Algerian government does not have, to date, any element that could confirm or deny this information”. It was the first official Algerian reaction to the claim by the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) that they had cut the throats of French monks kidnapped two months ago from their Medea monastery, south of Algiers.
French leaders have confirmed that the GIA statement was authentic. Prayers were said for the monks in Paris mosques on Friday and bells will toll in Roman Catholic churches all over the country after the main mass on Sunday.
Politicians, voicing horror at the news, agreed to lead a mourning rally in Paris on Tuesday. “If (the killings) were confirmed, it would cause indignation, revulsion and condemnation in Algeria. It would be in the bloodthirsty and barbarian logic of these criminal groups,” the Algerian interior ministry said.
“Since the kidnapping of the Trappist monks, the Algerian government has spared no effort to find them unharmed. Research operations will continue unabated until the criminal kidnappers are punished with all the law’s rigour,” it said.
APS said the French ambassador discussed the fate of the monks with the Algerian foreign ministry’s secretary general on Saturday. It gave no details of the talks. The GIA message said the monks, aged 50 to 82, had been slaughtered on Tuesday. They were kidnapped on March 27.
A French expert on terrorism, Roland Jacquard, said it was virtually certain that some of them were killed last month.
French officials said there was every sign that the message, sent to a Moroccan radio station and saying the priests were killed after France refused to negotiate for their release, was genuine.
They said it used the same quotations from the Qur’an and the same phrasing as previous GIA communiques and was signed with the stamp of the group’s leader Djamel Zitouni.
It also had an authenticating reference to a previously undisclosed audio cassette delivered to the French embassy in Algiers on April 30 with a demand for negotiations on the release of Islamic prisoners.
The French daily Liberation quoted an Islamic newsletter, el-Ansar, as saying it would recount in its next issue what happened between the monks’ abduction and their deaths.
Ansar would also publish a letter allegedly sent by French authorities to the GIA, as well as disclosures of what it said were France’s efforts to doublecross the GIA.
Prime Minister Alain Juppe has confirmed that France had refused to negotiate with the “terrorists” of the GIA, which has killed dozens of foreign residents, including 18 members of the clergy, since ordering all foreigners to leave Algeria in 1993.
Foreign Minister Herve de Charette hinted Paris would get even with the alleged killers, saying: “Never will these crimes be erased from our memories, and France’s memory is long.”
The outlawed Algerian fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) condemned the monks’ killing as running counter to Islam.
The GIA, a radical offshoot of FIS, accuses France of aiding and abetting Algerian President Liamine Zeroual’s military-led government. Some 50,000 people have been killed in four years of civil strife in Algeria since authorities cancelled elections that FIS was poised to win.
Reuters (Paris) – May 25, 1996 – François Raitberger