Algeria Standoff Ends in Clash That Kills 5 People

ALGIERS —  A hostage standoff on the outskirts of this North African capital ended Monday with a clash that left dead at least four Muslim militants and a member of the government security force.

The standoff began Saturday night, when nine Islamic militants barricaded themselves in an apartment building with an unknown number of hostages and began firing machine guns at officials outside.

Details of the clash were sketchy. Some Algerian press reports said the armed group was the personal security detail of Djamel Zitouni, a leader of the Armed Islamic Group, the most militant of Algeria’s armed factions.

Others said some of the militants were the same ones suspected in Saturday’s assassination of former Interior Minister Mohammed Hardi in Oued Smar, a southern suburb of Algiers.

Hardi was the second former interior minister to die in nine months. In September, gunmen killed Aboubakr Belkaid.

Algeria’s insurgency, an attempt to topple the secular government and install strict Islamic law, began in January 1992, when the military-backed government canceled legislative elections that the Islamic Salvation Front was poised to win. About 40,000 people have died in the ensuing violence.