Algerian Security Forces Kill Islamic Radical in Gun Battle

Algerian security forces have killed Algeria’s most wanted man, an elusive Islamic radical who led a six-year terror campaign that caused the slaughter of thousands of civilians, authorities announced Saturday.

Antar Zouabri, the alleged chieftain of the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, died Friday in a 2 1/2-hour gun battle with pursuing troops in his hometown, Boufarik, about 15 miles south of Algiers, according to a statement by the government.

At a rare news conference, the Algerian military displayed the corpse of Zouabri, who had been falsely reported dead in the past, along with the bodies of two other alleged GIA combatants.

“The identity of Antar Zouabri was confirmed by his fingerprints,” said a regional army commander, Gen. Fodil Cherif Brahim, according to wire service reports.

Troops cornered Zouabri in a house near a stadium in Boufarik and killed him after an exchange of gunfire and grenades, Brahim said.

In addition to playing a central role in an Algerian civil war that has claimed more than 100,000 lives since 1992, the GIA waged a campaign of terrorist bombings in France in the mid-1990s. GIA terrorists also hijacked an Air France jet in 1994 with the intent to crash it into the Eiffel Tower--a plot that was foiled when a French SWAT team stormed the plane on the ground in Marseille, killing four terrorists.

And in the late 1990s, members of the GIA and its offshoot factions became an important component of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, seeing combat in Afghanistan and Russia’s separatist republic of Chechnya and deploying in terrorist cells in Europe, North America and elsewhere. Algerian terrorists aligned with Al Qaeda and based in Canada were behind a failed attempt to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in late 1999.

Zouabri, whose age is apparently unknown, became the emir, or leader, of the GIA in 1996 after its former leader, Djamel Zitouni, was killed in an internal feud. The GIA’s stated goal is the imposition of fundamentalist Islamic rule in Algeria.

Under Zouabri’s ruthless reign, the GIA engaged in indiscriminate massacres of civilians, descending on villages and cutting victims’ throats by the hundreds, according to Algerian authorities.

The GIA’s increasingly bloody methods hastened its split with a dissident faction known as the Salafist Group for Call and Combat. Though also ruthless and accused of killing civilians, that Islamic extremist group has an announced policy of going after primarily military and official targets.

Zouabri’s death is a major blow to the GIA, which had already been in decline and now numbers only a few hundred fighters, according to press reports.

The Algerian security forces will now probably focus their crackdown on the leader of the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, Hassan Hattab. His followers also have been active in Al Qaeda terrorist cells dismantled in recent months in Italy, Spain, France and other European countries.

The military-backed government of Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has made considerable progress against Islamic fundamentalist rebels since 1999 with a combination of force and pacification.

Thousands of former terrorists have accepted an amnesty offer from the government. Scores of others have fallen in a fierce and murky war with the security and intelligence services.

The Algerian civil conflict began in 1992, when the government declared a state of emergency and blocked the election victory of Islamic militants.