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Beheaded monks victims of plot by military

John Lichfield
Tuesday 24 December 2002 01:00 GMT
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Seven French monks beheaded by "Islamist" terrorists in Algeria in 1996 were the victims of a plot by the Algerian military government, the newspaper Libération said yesterday. In the latest of a series of allegations on the involvement of the Algerian military in apparent Islamist crimes, a former Algerian security officer said the Trappist monks were kidnapped in March 1996 by a terror group that was controlled by the army.

The intention was to remove the monks from a sensitive area and to persuade the French government to support the Algerian regime in its fight against Islamic fundamentalist "terrorism", Abdelkadr Tigha told the newspaper.

He said fellow agents kidnapped the monks from their monastery at Tiberhirine, near Medea, south-west of Algiers, and handed them to a double agent in the hardline Armed Islamic Group (GIA). The GIA admitted it had murdered the monks after the French and Algerian governments refused to negotiate.

Mr Tigha was a brigadier in the Algerian military security service, the Departément du Renseignement et Securité, at the height of the so-called dirty war in Algeria in 1993-97, when hundreds of people, including 117 foreigners, were murdered by terrorists claiming to belong to the GIA.

In December 1999, Mr Tigha fled from Algeria and is in prison in Thailand, accused of overstaying his visa. In an interview given to Libération in prison, Mr Tigha said at least some of the groups acting in the name of fundamentalist Islam in Algeria in the Nineties were formed or controlled by the army, which wished to discredit the Islamists and encourage an atmosphere of terror.

Similar allegations have been made by other Algerian former military or intelligence officers. During a trial in Paris in July, a former colonel, Mohamed Samraoui, said that "beyond a certain point" the Algerian military had "lost control of the groups we had created or infiltrated. We didn't know which groups were which any more, whether they were ours or not."

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