Word: algerianness
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...earlier at Algiers' Houari-Boumediene Airport, did not end with that 17-minute firefight. Several hours after the rescue, the Armed Islamic Group (G.I.A.), the militant movement that claimed responsibility for the hijacking, avenged its "martyrs" by murdering four Roman Catholic priests -- three French and one Belgian -- in the Algerian city of Tizi-Ouzou. The deaths brought to 76 the number of foreigners killed in Algeria, including 26 French nationals, since the G.I.A. began its antiforeign assassination spree in September...
...blue uniforms with Air Algerie identification badges caused no alarm. Explaining they were security agents, the men proceeded to check the passengers' passports. Then they suddenly closed and locked the doors. "I knew it was a hostage taking when they shouted, 'Allah is great!' " recalled a 40-year-old Algerian-born mechanic now living in France. "I thought of my children back in France, and I became afraid. Three men entered the cockpit, the fourth covered us with his Kalashnikov. No one budged. Then the waiting started...
...travelers, the wait was over all too soon. One traveler, an Algerian policeman identified during the passport check, was ordered by the hijackers to the front of the plane. Passengers heard him plead, "Don't kill . me, I have a wife and child!" The terrorists shot him in the head and dumped him outside onto a baggage cart, where he lay in agony for some time. The second victim was Bui Giang To, 48, a commercial attache at the Vietnamese embassy in Algiers. "They asked the Vietnamese man sitting in the rear to come forward," recounted one of the passengers...
...terrorists' first concerns was to see that all the women, including the stewardesses, were veiled in the fundamentalist Islamic fashion: those who had no scarves were given cabin blankets. The men recited verses from the Koran and tried to reassure their Algerian compatriots, but, in the words of one passenger, "terrorized" non-Algerians. "They had a kind of art in their terror," an elderly Algerian man told the TF1 television network after the rescue. "Twenty minutes of relaxation and 20 minutes of torture. You never knew what was next...
...Algerian police ringed the airport, Interior Minister Abderahmane Meziane-Cherif rushed to the control tower and began negotiating with the hijackers via the cockpit radio. Using the pilot, Bernard Delhemme, to speak for them, the terrorists demanded the release from house arrest of Abassi Madani and Ali Belhadj, the leaders of the Islamic Salvation Front (F.I.S.), the political party that was banned by the Algerian government in 1992. "Start by freeing the women, the elderly and the children if you want us to start talking," replied Cherif. About four hours into the negotiations, the hijackers began releasing passengers...