"We have cut the throats of the seven monks," a statement by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA) read out on Moroccan radio on May 21st, 1996, said. The monks of Tibehirine had been kidnapped from Our Lady of the Atlas monastery, 100 km south of Algiers, 56 days earlier. The French Foreign Ministry quickly authenticated the GIA's communique number 44, and Monsignor Jean-Marie Lustiger, the Archbishop of Paris, snuffed out the candles he had lit in Notre Dame Cathedral to pray for the priests' survival.
Officially, France holds the GIA responsible for the atrocity. But an investigation by Le Monde's religious affairs correspondent, Henri Tincq, now casts doubt on the accepted version of events. Church circles in Rome, as well as former Algerian military officers, believe that Algerian intelligence services played a role in the murders and in the August 1st, 1996, assassination of the Bishop of Oran, Monsignor Pierre Claverie.
"There are too many shadows, too many mysteries surrounding their deaths," Mr Tincq told The Irish Times. "We can no longer blame it all on `wicked Islamists'."
The GIA is widely believed to be infiltrated by Algerian military intelligence, and former Algerian officers have alleged in the past that the Algiers government was involved in GIA bombings in France. But this is the first time Catholic Church sources have accused Algiers - even indirectly - of responsibility for the deaths of the monks and Bishop Claverie.
When the Algerian government announced on May 30th, 1996, that the monks' bodies had been found, church officials asked to travel south to see the remains. To their surprise, they were told that the bodies were in the morgue of Ain Nadja military hospital in Algiers. The churchmen insisted (against the will of the authorities) on seeing the bodies, and learned to their horror that only the severed heads of the monks had been found. At the funeral ceremony in Tibehirine, dirt was put in the coffins to weigh them down.
The least damaging hypothesis for Algiers, Mr Tincq says, is that the monks were killed accidentally in a shoot-out between the army and Islamists; the military beheaded them to blame their deaths on the GIA. But the more widely-believed theory is that Algerian Military Security infiltrated the kidnappers from the outset and had the monks killed to foil negotiations between the French government and the Islamists. Djamel Zitouni, who was then the leader of the GIA, sent an emissary to the French embassy in Algiers on April 30th, 1996, with an audiocassette recorded by the monks. The messenger demanded a receipt on embassy letterhead and was never seen again: he is rumoured in Algiers to have been murdered.
Djaffar El Houari, an Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) leader exiled in London, claims the French had managed to locate the monks and were preparing a commando raid to free them. His assertion concurs with May 1996 statements by the abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Aiguebelle in France, who claimed that a French government envoy had seen the monks in captivity.
In an interview with the review Confluences Mediterranee, a former Algerian officer known as "Captain Haroun" has said that Mr Zitouni's deputy was a lieutenant in military security, and that the monks were murdered as the result of a dispute between French and Algerian intelligence agencies.
Sources within both the Catholic Church and French diplomatic circles told Mr Tincq they believe that Monsignor Claverie was assassinated by an Algerian military clan opposed to good relations between Paris and Algiers. The sophistication of the remote-control bomb used to kill the bishop and his driver leads them to believe it was the work of government forces, not Islamists.