A lawyer who represents the families of hundreds of Algerian "disappeared", Mr Mohamed Tahri, was missing last night after being dragged by police from a peaceful demonstration.
Mr Tahri organised a protest march yesterday morning by the mothers and sisters of the "disappeared" - men taken from their homes, presumably by security forces, and never seen again.
All public gatherings are banned in Algeria, unless given prior written permission by the authorities. Associates of Mr Tahri said last night his family was very worried, and did not know where he was being held. They said more than a dozen women demonstrators were also arrested.
Mr Tahri has angered the Algerian government by publicising the fate of the disappeared. In an interview with The Irish Times before his arrest, he estimated there are 12,000 people missing. The official government-run human rights league recognises the existence of fewer than 300 such cases.
At the beginning of the war in 1992, Mr Tahri said, the authorities arrested Islamic militants, especially those who had stood in cancelled parliamentary elections.
"Now the circle has widened. It's like a rock thrown in a pond and the ripples spread out wider and wider. It encompasses everybody now - people who have nothing to do with politics. It's enough to have a brother in an armed group, and they say all his relatives are terrorists.
"We have many cases where students were arrested, then those who knew them. It also goes by professions. If one doctor is arrested, others follow. The conditions are more and more arbitrary; they arrest anyone, any time. There are no more rules." Mr Tahri's office in the Kouba district of Algiers was ransacked one night in June, and the files of many of his clients were stolen.
His office has become a twice-weekly meeting place for the sad, poor and uneducated women who look to him as their only hope of finding their loved ones.
Almost all of the women wear Islamic veils. Some of their relatives were arrested in broad daylight by men in police or army uniforms. Others were taken at night by gunmen in civilian clothes. When the women inquire at police stations and military barracks, they are told there is no trace of the men being detained.
Pro-government newspapers will condemn Mr Tahri for inviting foreign journalists to the demonstration. Tirades against foreign media - especially the French - are frequent. The authorities react virulently to all calls for foreign intervention in Algeria's 51/2-year civil war.
As the lawyer for the family of the imprisoned deputy leader of FIS, Sheikh Ali Belhadj, and of the third-ranking FIS leader, Mr Abdelkader Hashani, who was freed this summer, Mr Tahri is closely watched by the police. When several dozen demonstrators began congregating outside the Algiers central post office yesterday morning, they were outnumbered by plainclothes policemen.
Uniformed police then arrived and began pushing and shouting at the demonstrators and foreign journalists here to cover Thursday's municipal elections.
Algeria's rebel Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) yesterday urged the international community to put pressure on the Algiers government to open talks with Muslim fundamentalist rebels.
In Bonn, the FIS called upon "states, governments and official international organisations to try to convince the Algerian government to negotiate a political settlement".