When Reda, now 23, began training with a commando unit of the Algerian army at Biskra last January, he and other conscripts were introduced to a strange whitish liquid, which he says made him feel like Rambo.
"There was a doctor in uniform called Dr Sadek, and he gave it to us. We injected one another. It makes you feel as if you are on the moon, as if you are dreaming. When we killed men, it was as if we were killing cats."
In May, Reda was transferred to the garrison town of Blida, 50km south of Algiers. He recalls a 2.0 a.m. outing to the nearby town of Sidi Moussa. "We ordered people out of their houses. We stole everything - money, gold. We beat people with our Klashes [Kalashnikov rifles]. We took 16 prisoners. Our officers told us there were terrorists among them."
The 16 men were taken to the basement of Blida barracks. "There was a special room where they tortured, called al katela - the killing room," Reda says. "It was like a morgue. We said `You gave shelter and food to terrorists. Tell us about them'. We drilled holes in their hands and bodies with an electric drill. We burned their beards. I did not do it personally, but we were a group. My role was to stand guard."
Some prisoners were sodomised with bottles, a method used by the French during the 1954-1962 Algerian war of independence. The chiffon or rag, another French torture in which the victim is forced to swallow salty or soapy water, acid or his own urine, was also used. "In the cells they were stripped naked. It was very cold, and from time to time we sprayed them with water . . .
"Three of them died: one when they drilled a hole in his stomach, two others from electric shocks when they put wires in their ears and anuses."
Reda and his unit took the dead torture victims back to Sidi Moussa. "If they wanted to bury them, their families had to pay us 50,000 dinars (£540). We gave them sealed coffins that they had to bury in our presence. We told them their men died of heart attacks, but they knew we killed them."
Reda briefly clicks a new set of false teeth out of his mouth with his tongue, to prove his only act of courage: "I hid some bread in my jacket and gave it to the detainees. They found out, and four men kicked my teeth in with their boots. They locked me up for a week."
Last June, Reda's unit went out at midnight with a group of career soldiers who ordered them to wait on a ridge 3km above a small village. If they saw flares, the conscripts were to join the others, but they were not called in. "The next day, we heard that that 28 people had been beheaded in that place. I started to think that the soldiers were the killers." Massacre survivors often report the killers look like Muslim fundamentalists. "Two days later," Reda continues, "we were cleaning the barracks. My friend found a fake beard in one of the soldiers' pockets. We also found musk perfume like the Islamists wear."
The incident convinced Reda that the military committed the massacre "to discredit the terrorists". He also believes the army murdered 26 conscripts who were taken to another barracks in the mountains above Blida. "None of the full-time soldiers were hurt," he says. "They brought the conscripts' bodies back, and they said they died in a gunfight. Maybe they thought they talked too much. We knew they were killed - eliminated."
During a night-time gun battle in July, under the streetlamps of Blida, Reda decided to run away. "I saw eight friends of mine dead around me. The terrorists saw me. They knew me. Some of them had been friends of mine in Algiers. They wore jeans and leather jackets. They shouted to me: `There are plenty of days left in the year. We will get you, Reda. Make provisions for your wife and child.' I and three others dropped our Klashes and ran."
Like the majority of Algerians, Reda was threatened from both sides. "Now that I am a deserter, I am caught between two fires," he says. "Between the terrorists and the military."
With his muscular body, short haircut and wearing a track-suit, Insp Abdessalam (37) looks like a cop. When the war started in 1992, he began sleeping at the police station at Dar El Baida, near Algiers airport.
"Every day our friends were getting killed. We were terrorised. All the police were smoking hashish, taking drugs, wine, pills - anything not to think about the situation. When we went out to kill, we always took tablets."
Abdessalam was in charge of the armoury of Algerian-made Kalashnikovs, Italian and US weapons. From Italy came Beretta 92 FS 7mm and 9mm pistols, pump-action shotguns, and ammunition. The US supplied tear gas, uniforms and bullet proof vests, while police cars were imported from Germany, Spain and France.
"Our superiors told us, `don't bring back prisoners', " Abdessalam recalls. "I was a driver and in charge of equipment, but I saw my friends killing so-called Islamists in cold blood every day." He recounts a gun battle in which 90 people were killed at Sidi Moussa, and an attack on the home of an Islamist leader in Ben Zarga, where three children, two women and a man were burned alive.
At the Dar El Baida security headquarters, three torturers from the judiciary police worked full time in the mechanics' garage.
"They would tear out hair, beards, fingernails," Abdessalam recalls. "They put the prisoners' private parts on the table and beat them with sticks. They sodomised them with bottles. Some died under torture. Others were taken outside the city and set free, then shot in the back."
It was fear of his own government that led Abdessalam to desert 2 1/2 years ago. "The majority of policemen who died were killed by le pouvoir - by those in power. They were people who didn't want to obey orders, or whom they suspected of being against them. I lost many friends.
"The killers came to their houses, or walked up to them in the street. When the killers are followed, they go straight back to a barracks, usually the Ben Aknoun barracks. We would hear them on the radio, saying `What do we do now?' and the order would come back: `Mission terminated. Return to barracks.' "
Dalila (30), used to love her job as a plain-clothes inspector with the Algerian police's intelligence service. Then she was posted to the Algiers Cavignac police station in 1993. "I didn't like what was happening within the police," she says. "Innocent young people were being tortured like wild animals." The euphemism for torture was nakdoulou eslah. "It means: `Our guest is here, we have to treat him well,' " Dalila explains.
"There were people executed at 11 at night," she continues. "People who had done nothing. They were denounced by people who didn't get along with them. I said to my commanding officer, Hamid: `You mustn't do these things, because we are all Muslims. You should at least have evidence against people before you kill them.' He said, `My girl, you are not made for the police force. If you suspect someone, you must kill him. When you kill people, that is how you get promoted.'"
The ground-floor garage of the Cavignac police station was a round-the-clock torture centre, Dalila says. "Some people went completely mad from being tortured. Everyone who was arrested and taken to Cavignanc was tortured. Seventy per cent of the cops would have seen it. Although it was the job of the judiciary police, the other cops joined in.
"They tied young people to a ladder with a rope," she continues. "There was a pipe from a tap that they stuck in their throat, and they ran the water until their bellies swelled up.
"The prisoners were in cells and they were brought one by one to the ladder. They kicked them in the ribs; anyone would come and hit them. They were always shirtless, usually in trousers, sometimes in underpants . . . They put them back in their cells covered in blood. I saw two people who died under torture. Their bodies were tied to the ladder. The torturers said, `take them to the hospital and say they died in a shoot-out'. They did the same thing with those who were killed at 11 p.m. I had to fill out the death certificates so the bodies could be removed from the hospital."
Dalila felt sorry for an older man who had been tortured. "His arm was rotting. He had gangrene and it smelled very bad. I went to buy him some medicine. I bought some penicillin powder and put it on his arm. There were 20 to 30 people in a cell. There were no toilets. There were six people in the cell who had been tortured. It smelled like death in there.
"This older man, about 55, made an impression on me because he was suffering horribly and he hadn't done anything. A policeman saw me give him the medicine. I begged him not to tell anyone, but he wrote a report to the commissioner. The commissioner called me in and said, `Your case will go to the national commission. Maybe you will go to prison for helping terrorists.' The man I helped was freed afterwards, which proved he was innocent."
At the same time, four young men - presumably Islamists - went to Dalila's home in Algiers and told her mother she had only 15 days to give them her weapon. Like Reda and Abdessalam, she was "caught between two fires" and fled the country. Now she lives in north London, haunted by memories of her fiance Abdelkader, a policeman who was murdered in 1993, and two close girlfriends who were shot dead a year later.
"I am being treated by a psychologist," Dalila says. "I have bad dreams. My great passion is to go to see horror movies. It's the only thing that interests me. I want to see blood. I can't sleep in the dark because I'm afraid."