Word: algerian
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...Italy's sports pages duly took note of other Muslim players who observe Ramadan with varying degrees of strictness, including Siena's Abdel Kader Ghezzal, an Algerian who scored a goal against AC Milan on Saturday. Though a practicing Muslim, Ghezzal says he does not fast on training and game days during Ramadan. Inter's Muntari is more observant, though he reportedly ate pasta at lunch on Sunday, while refusing water before the match. Most imams say there are just a few groups of people exempted from the daytime fast, including pregnant women, the sick and the elderly. Though...
...Some analysts think that historical legacy can still be exploited. A 2007 report by the Rand Corp., a U.S. think tank, advised Western governments to "harness" Sufism, saying its adherents were "natural allies of the West." Along similar lines, the Algerian government announced in July that it would promote the nation's Sufi heritage on radio and television in a bid to check the powerful influence of Salafism, a more extreme strain of Islam that is followed by al-Qaeda-backed militants waging a war against the country's autocratic state...
Skeptics have long sniffed at the official Franco-Algerian version of how the monks were abducted and murdered. But Buchwalter's statement - given to investigating magistrate Marc Trévidic, who also happens to be overseeing the Pakistan case - blows the biggest hole yet in the idea that the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) killed the seven men. According to Buchwalter, an army intelligence official serving as military attaché to France's embassy in Algiers at the time of the killings, he was told by Algerian colleagues that the monks had died when an Algerian army helicopter patrolling an area...
...exchanged for captured militants, a notion that perplexed terrorist experts more used to the GIA killing its enemies in well-planned strikes. Puzzlement grew when the GIA issued a second communiqué in May, saying that it had "slit the throats of the seven monks." Some French officials suspect Algerian secret-service officials had actually staged the abduction to further demonize the GIA in European eyes. The follow-up plan to free the monks in a "rescue operation," sources speculate, was ruined when unsuspecting regular-army forces attacked the suspected militants. Algerian leaders have emphatically denied all allegations. Read "Fighting...
News of Buchwalter's testimony has prompted others with knowledge of the case to go public. Former French anti-terrorism magistrate Alain Marsaud noted on July 7 that he, too, had alerted his superiors that an Algerian intelligence official had told him that the army had been responsible for the killings. That warning, Marsaud says, was "intentionally buried." Father Armand Veilleux, who in 1996 was procurator general of the Cistercian order in Rome, says he met stiff resistance from French officials in Algiers when he insisted on seeing the corpses - and was ultimately told only the heads had been recovered...