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Imam Arrested After Assault on Single Women in Algeria
ALGIERS, July 16 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Algerian security forces have arrested a Muslim imam accused of prompting some 500 religious activists to attack single women, whom he accused of lewdness and prostitution, in the oil city of Hassi Messaoud, press reports said Monday.
The Muslim leader reportedly denounced single women working in the oil center during a sermon at the main mosque on Friday, saying they had "loose morals", press reports said.
Western news agencies said the men launched the attack last Friday against unmarried women living in slums in the industrial zone of Hassi Messaoud, where many foreign oil workers live.
At least seven other men suspected of leading the assault were arrested, the newspaper L'Authentique reported.
Twenty women were injured in the attack, official secular press newspapers said, adding that some women were molested.
The city, located some 800 kilometers (500 miles) southeast of Algiers in the center of Algeria's oldest and largest oilfield, was calm but tense following the raid, newspapers reported on Monday.
Press reports said the women, some of them widows with small children, and others divorced or banished by their husbands, had come to the city from the north in search of jobs and were working as domestic servants for foreign employers.
Prostitution is illegal but tolerated in Algeria, where the military prevented Islamic activists from being elected to power in 1992, sparking the country's long-running civil war.
Many of the victims and their children are being sheltered at a youth hostel and are under police protection, while some with serious injuries are in hospitals.
In the absence of any official statement, the independent press held an open debate Monday on the reasons for the attack.
The daily secular newspaper, Le Matin, blamed the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), saying the outlawed conservative party was signaling its return to politics with a violent "inquisition".
Le Matin criticized the peace initiative of President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who came to power in 1999, under which thousands of Islamic extremists were amnestied and remain at large.
In addition, they cited two other incidents - an attack Saturday on a discotheque in northeastern Ain Taghrout and the killing of five dancers at a hotel in Tebessa near the border of Tunisia late last month - as being motivated by religious conservatism.
Le Quotidien d'Oran saw an economic underpinning to the raid, surmising that local unemployed residents resented the single working women from the north.
Since 1991, the struggle involving the military and Islamists have dominated Algerian politics. During that year, a general election won by an Islamist party was annulled, marking the beginning of a bloody campaign that has seen the slaughtering of tens of thousands of people. Both sides have blamed each other for the bloody events, with many saying Western countries were also involved.
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