Algeria's former ruling party emerged today as the probable winner of parliamentary elections marred by violence and a low turnout after an opposition boycott.
Yesterday’s vote was the second since Islamic extremist groups launched a bloody uprising a decade ago following the cancellation of an election a now-banned Muslim fundamentalist party was poised to win.
Political sources said the National Liberation Front (FLN), formerly the dominant force in Algeria's post-independence one-party socialist state, won the most seats in the 389-strong lower house of parliament, the National Popular Assembly. Official results were expected to be proclaimed this morning.
The FLN, headed by Prime Minister Ali Benflis, held 62 seats in the outgoing 381-strong chamber.
But opposition leaders, citing fraud, dismissed the results as irrelevant and unlikely to solve the vast, energy-rich North African country's prolonged social and political crisis.
The poll was overshadowed by violence with Islamic rebels slaughtering 25 civilians in northwest Algeria hours before the vote. It was the latest in a series of massacres in an undeclared civil war in which more than 100,000 people have died since 1992.
The bloody rebel raid occurred in the village of Sendjas in Chlef province, some 125 miles west of Algiers.
The victims, including a two-month-old infant among 14 children, were nomads living in tents in a remote area. A civil defense official said that 21 of them had their throats slit, two were set on fire and two shot dead.