Fundamentalists Assail Slayings But They Say Junta Is To Blame For Killing Of Innocent Civilians

Algeria’s leading Muslim fundamentalist movement has condemned recent slayings of civilians in Algeria and blamed most of them on the military-backed government.

The Islamic Salvation Front, in a statement Friday, expressed its “outrage at the latest killings of innocent civilians, especially women and children.”

The Salvation Front said the murders “are meant to serve the illegal junta, which has always aimed at spreading confusion through organized terror,” and said most of the killings “point directly to the junta and its death squads.”

The message came a day after the bodies of two teenage sisters, their throats slit, were found near their looted home. That raised to nine the number of young women killed in a week since Islamic militants threatened to increase such attacks.

More than 30,000 people have died in the conflict that broke out after the government canceled January 1992 elections the Salvation Front was expected to win.

The Salvation Front and its Islamic Salvation Army are not the only groups fighting the government. The Armed Islamic Group said that it would begin attacking female relatives of security force members if authorities did not free women jailed for supporting the militants.

Militants also threatened revenge because of a mock trial held by women’s rights activists in which fundamentalist leaders were symbolically sentenced to death.

The Salvation Front communique said it “condemns attacks against individuals, men or women, who exercise their right of peaceful expression, such as scholars, politicians, writers and journalists.”