Posted on 04/21/2009 10:15:52 PM PDT by forkinsocket
The locals in the mountain village of Ait Hidja still speak of the night six months ago when members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) decapitated a prison warden and set fire to his car.
“The night they cut his head there was such terror in the village,” says Ahcene Idja, an unemployed university graduate. “Then they kidnapped a man and held him hostage until his family paid ransom.”
The now-abandoned stone cottage where the killing took place stands on a country road rising from the valley to the village. The burnt hulk of the car lies in the vegetation outside.
“Anyone close to the state is a target.” says a local official. “The cottage was a bar serving alcoholic drinks. They came at night and searched everyone there and when they found he was a prison guard they killed him.”
Ait Hidja is in the Djudjura mountains in the Berber-speaking region of Kabylia 100 kilometres (62 miles) east of Algiers. This is a landscape of craggy peaks, wooded slopes and isolated villages. Although peace has largely returned to Algeria after the near-civil war of the 1990s, in this corner of the country a low-level insurgency continues, with no end in sight.
Suspected AQIM militants staged an ambush 350km east of Algiers, killing three security guards working for a Brazilian company and abducting one. On the same day a bomb killed a police officer on a road near the town of Bouira on the western edge of Kabylia.
The region’s mountains have been the stomping grounds of Islamist militants who took up arms against the state when the army aborted elections in 1991 to prevent an Islamist victory.
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
Hey! At least they didn't threaten to put him in a cell with a caterpillar!
“Hey! At least they didn’t threaten to put him in a cell with a caterpillar!”
Or put panties on his head. OMG, we would hear about it ad nauseum for months from the BS media.
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