Attackers, reportedly screaming like jackals, massacred at least 87 people near the capital, slashing throats, cutting off arms and opening women's stomachs, survivors and hospital officials said at the weekend.
About 100 people were injured in the three-hour attack which began on Friday night on the outskirts of Beni Messous, 12 miles west of Algiers, officials at Beni Messous and Algiers Maillot hospitals said. They spoke on condition they would not be named.
Two opposition political parties claimed about 150 people were killed in the attack, which occurred in a wooded area with no electricity and numerous makeshift homes.
About 50 men armed with knives and hatchets surrounded the area at about 10 p.m, then kicked in doors and went after their victims, most of whom were women.
The assailants reportedly screamed like jackals as they surrounded the area, something witnesses to previous massacres have recounted.
The 40-member Bouzidi family was decimated, survivors said.
The massacre was the most deadly since the August 29th slaughter in the village of Rais, south of Algiers, where up to 300 were slain.
The people of Beni Messous screamed, banged on pots and pans or clapped stones together in a desperate call for help. But it was not until 1 a.m. that security forces arrived and the assailants left.
A military barracks is located in Beni Messous and there was no immediate explanation as to why help did not come sooner.
Nor was there any immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks. But such massacres are usually blamed on the Armed Islamic Group, one of several factions trying to topple Algeria's military-backed government.
More than 60,000 people have been killed since the start of the insurgency, triggered when the army cancelled 1992 parliamentary elections to thwart a likely victory by the Islamic Salvation Front, which is now banned.
"They kicked the door in, took the men, forced them outside, slit their throats," the sole survivor of the eight-member Benbrahin family said.
"They came back, took out my aunt and slit her throat, after slashing open her stomach," said the shaken woman, who refused to provide her first name.
She said three men attacked her home. She escaped through a window when the attackers went outside, then hid in a nearby forest till daybreak. "I'm the lone survivor of the Benbrahin family." The Front for Socialist Forces said its members in the area put the death toll at 151, and the Movement for a Peaceful Society, a moderate Islamic party, said it learned the death toll was 150.
"We heard victims screaming and cries for help, but no one came," one of those who escaped the massacre said.
By midday, some frightened inhabitants of the town were fleeing.
The hospital sources said the victims had their throats slit, some had arms cut off and some women had their stomachs slashed.
The attack was the latest in a new wave of violence which began after the June 5th parliamentary elections - the first since the cancelled vote.
A psychosis of fear was perceptible around the Algiers area.
"We no longer sleep or do so in turns," said a resident of Bouzareah, near Beni Messous.
The attack followed a series of killings on Friday and Saturday which left nearly 100 people dead, most of them Muslim militants killed by security forces.
Four people were killed and 27 injured by a bomb planted under a seat of a bus near Blida. Four members of the Algerian Renewal Party, all reportedly candidates in next month's local elections, had their throats slit at a road-block near Saida. Another 16 people were killed in a series of attacks in the same region.
Security forces killed 48 Muslim extremists near Chrea, outside Blida, and 20 others in the Djerba region south of Algiers, newspapers said.