ISLAMIC extremists hacked to death 42 villagers with axes and swords in Algeria one day after 93 people were butchered in an upsurge of violence that has exposed the impotence of security forces.
The attackers stormed into the village of Omaria, just south of Algiers, in the middle of Tuesday night and killed 17 women, 22 men and three babies, El ~Vatan newspaper reported yesterday.
The slaughter came barely 24 hours after some 200 extremists attacked an isolated farmstead in Bougara, 25 km south east of Algiers, butchering 93 villagers.
The Bougara massacre, in which men, women and children were knifed or clubbed to death or burned alive, was the worst in five years of civil war. It prompted strong condemnations from around the world.
The massacres come six weeks before general elections, the first since the cancellation of a second round of polling in January 1992 which the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) had been poised to win. That cancellation precipitated five years of unrest and violence which have left more than 60,000 people dead, mostly civilians, according to western estimates.
President Liamine Zeroual has pledged to wipe out the armed groups and promised that the elections on June 5th - involving nearly all the legal opposition parties - will take place peacefully. However, the latest killings underline the complete collapse of government security operations in the Mitidja plain south of Algiers.
The Islamist groups, who hide out in inaccessible marsh, forest and mountain regions, attack isolated villages under cover of night, sometimes bringing lists of people to be eliminated.
Local witnesses of the Bougara attack described how the fundamentalists, "with beards down to their waists" and some mounted on horseback, stormed into the village at night after setting mines and bombs on the outskirts to deter security forces.
The killers slit the throats of their victims or clubbed them to death with farm implements, and many of those slain were disembowelled and mutilated.
Others were burned alive in their homes and five young girls were reported to have been abducted. Witnesses described the massacre as carefully planned.
One 14 year old survivor of the carnage described seeing the killers slit the throats of his father, mother, brothers and aunts.
The two mass killings bring to at least 350 the number of people killed in the Blida and Medea regions since the start of April.
Pope John Paul yesterday called for peace and reconciliation in Algeria when he received Algeri~a's new ambassador to the Vatican, who was presenting his credentials.