Judges cast doubt on Algerian version of monks’ murder

French magistrates investigating the kidnapping and murder of seven monks at Tibhirine in 1996 have cast serious doubts over the official Algerian account that blamed Islamist extremists for their deaths. The magistrates, who visited Algeria last October, said they saw photographs of the monks’ heads that the GIA Islamists who claimed responsibility for their kidnap said were taken right after their murder. However, their state of decomposition indicated they had died up to a month earlier.

The French delegation was able to exhume the monks’ heads, the only remains of them ever found, and said three seemed to have died by decapitation but others apparently lost their heads after they had died, which seemed to bolster a theory that the Algerian army staged the beheadings to blame the Islamists.