ALGIERS, 29 July (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - A government commission has issued a report sharply criticizing the behavior of Algerian police during riots earlier this year that left at least 80 people dead and 2,000 injured, news agencies reported.
The preliminary report on violence in the eastern Kabylie region says police provoked protesters by shooting live ammunition into crowds, beating people up and shouting obscenities.
"If someone gave the order to start firing, no one gave the order to stop," the report said.
The preliminary results of the long-awaited report on the unrest were broadcast on Algerian television and detailed more fully in Saturday's Algiers newspapers.
The report is the work of an independent commission set up by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika following bloody riots in April and May in Kabyle. The commission is headed by Mohand Issad, a respected expert in international law.
According to the BBC online service, the results support the key allegation made against the paramilitary police by the Berber leadership in Kabylie - that the police acted in a heavy-handed and illegal manner in the way it dealt with peaceful protests that followed the suspicious death in April of a Berber youth while in police custody.
It says the local police commanders ignored instructions from their superiors in Algiers when they used heavy munitions against the Berber demonstrators.
The Algerian television commentary says that the publication of this preliminary report confirmed President Bouteflika's promise to reveal full and frank details about the Berber unrest, BBC's online service reported.
The commentary said it also proved that the Algerian government could take on such a responsibility without foreign interference.
This was referring to demands from France and elsewhere that the Algerians allow an independent international inquiry into the causes of Berber unrest, BBC added.
The Kabylie region has been in tumult since April, when a Berber youth died in police custody. Daily protests soon spread to the capital, Algiers, with 1 million people taking to the streets on June 14 to denounce alleged government abuse of power.
Berbers say they are the original inhabitants of Muslim North Africa and have had tense relations with Algerian authorities for decades. Nearly one-third of the North African nation's 30 million people are of Berber origin.
Unrest in the Kabylie region comes on top of an Islamic movement now in its ninth year. The uprising erupted after the army canceled 1992 legislative elections that a Muslim party was poised to win.
