Algerian terror leader killed in military strike

ONE of North Africa’s most-wanted terror leaders, who allied his group with Osama bin Laden, has been killed, the Algerian military said yesterday.

Nabil Sahraoui, one of his key right-hand men and a “good number” of his other lieutenants were killed in a military sweep, the army said in a radio broadcast. Newspapers said the military cornered them in the Kabylie region east of the capital, Algiers.

The death of Sahraoui, head of the armed Salafist Group for Call and Combat, marked a major coup for Algerian government efforts to suppress Islamic terrorism.

The army radio broadcast said “Okacha the paratrooper,” a potential successor to Sahraoui whose real name is Abbi Abdelaziz, was also among those killed.

Sahraoui took over leadership of the Salafist group, known by its French acronym GSPC, last year and declared its allegiance with bin Laden’s al Qaida terror network in September.

That raised concerns that the Salafists, whose decade-long aim has been to overthrow the Algerian government, could become a dangerous affiliate of al Qaida and launch terrorist attacks beyond their North African territory.

Algerian newspapers said Sahraoui and Abdelaziz were among a group of militants killed Thursday and Friday in an army operation first launched two weeks ago after Islamic fighters killed about 10 soldiers.

The daily Liberte reported that a forensic police team identified Sahraoui’s body. The newspaper Le Soir said nearly 3,000 soldiers were involved in the military sweep in wooded mountains in the Bejaia region of Kabylie, some 160 miles east of Algiers.

An Algerian in his 30s, Sahraoui had a reputation for ruthlessness. His Salafists are one of two movements fighting to install an Islamic state in Algeria. Together, the two groups are blamed in the deaths of more than 120,000 Algerians since 1992.