Algeria Seizes Islamic Leader, Curbs Rallies

The government arrested the leader of Algeria’s Islamic party Wednesday and banned all gatherings outside mosques, trying to break the back of the Muslim fundamentalist movement.

The moves came 10 days after the military-backed government canceled Algeria’s first free parliamentary elections, which the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front was winning. Troops were sent into the streets, and hundreds of fundamentalists were reported arrested.

The Islamic Front said its acting president, Abdelkadir Hachani, was arrested Wednesday in the suburb of Bachjara, a stronghold of fundamentalist support.

The official Algerian news agency APS, quoting “sources close to the government,” said Hachani was arrested after he called on members of the army to revolt.

The Islamic Front issued a statement, signed by Hachani, on Tuesday that urged the army to “rid the people” of the authorities now in power.

APS also reported the arrest of journalists at the independent daily El Khabar, an Arabic-language newspaper that had printed two Islamic Front communiques.

About the time Hachani was arrested, the government announced a ban on any public assembly around mosques--an order certain to increase tensions with members of the Islamic Front.

“All gatherings around mosques are officially forbidden no matter what the day or hour,” Algerian officials said.

The ban comes two days before Friday prayers, the traditional political forum for the front.

Since it was recognized as a legal party in 1989, the front’s leaders have used mosques as the primary place to gather support, demonstrate the party’s strength and spread its message.

A government statement said the Cabinet also will take steps “to encourage education and religious practice and to prohibit all partisan activity” within mosques. It did not elaborate.

Hachani, a 36-year-old former teacher and petrochemical engineer, has been serving as head of the party since the arrest in June of party leaders Abassi Madani and Ali Belhadj.

He presided over the sweeping gains made by the fundamentalists during the opening round of parliamentary voting last month, the first multi-party national elections since independence from France in 1962. The party was expected to do well in runoff elections last week, but the government canceled the vote.

Algeria had been ruled by the National Liberation Front as a one-party, Marxist state since independence.