Some Survivors Return to Site of Algerian Carnage

Government soldiers guarded Rais on Saturday as a handful of survivors returned to a village where 300 people were slain a day earlier.

Charred homes, cafes and shops and doors broken down by marauders or left open by fleeing victims were what was left of Rais, where hooded assailants killed residents in a predawn massacre. The carnage appeared to be the worst of Algeria’s five-year Islamic insurgency.

Zahia Mehdi surveyed the burned-out home where her parents were killed, wondering how the five-hour rampage went undetected by soldiers in barracks half a mile away.

“Why didn’t anyone come to our help? The barracks are just a shout away,” said Mehdi, 26.

About 200 survivors fled north to the capital, Algiers, or nearby towns. With news filtering into Algiers on Saturday of still more massacres--47 more deaths in two other attacks the day before--the exodus from Rais continued.

“I left because there’s no more state to protect us,” Ali Benamrane, a 36-year-old farmer, said in Algiers. “There is no state--only a government of the night.”

Trying to prove otherwise, Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia said on national television Friday night that the perpetrators “will not go unpunished.”

The government, usually tight-lipped about attacks, put the Rais death toll at 98, with 120 wounded. But witnesses and hospital sources said 300 were killed and 200 wounded.