"Offense Against God"

Monotonously, the statistics of horror continued to mount. During January in Algeria, 555 people were killed, 990 seriously wounded. The meticulous compilation of figures tended to hide the terrifying reality--a child riddled with bullets, a young girl repeatedly stabbed in breast and back, a blind news dealer beaten to death by men he could not see. These bloodlettings take place not in the primitive backcountry of the Congo but in highly developed cities; the killing is not done by savages but by men who, in one way or another, purport to be part of French civilization. The murder is so efficient and predictable that gravediggers in Oran prepare burial sites before the day's consignment of corpses arrives.

The object of these killers--whether they support ex-General Raoul Salan's Secret Army Organization or the Moslem F.L.N.--is indiscriminate death: the machine gun fired from the speeding car can not be accurately aimed; the hand grenade lobbed into a crowded restaurant maims anyone within reach of its steel splinters; the bomb exploded in street or tenement kills whoever happens to be near by. One of the few men in Algeria to protest against the murderous nightmare is Leon Duval, 58, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Algiers. ''To repay evil with evil," he warned his fellow Europeans, "is to be conquered by evil. Replying to crime with crime is dishonor. To attack the innocent, inflicting cruel punishment upon them, is an offense against God!" In answer, his parishioners openly boo the archbishop in his cathedral and sneeringly refer to him as "Mohammed Duval."

Shattered Pillars. Basic agreement for an armistice between the De Gaulle regime and the Moslem F.L.N. drew ever closer. The F.L.N. has conceded French rights to the Sahara oil and has given ground on the question of French military bases in Algeria. The only problem remaining: guarantees for the safety of Europeans in an independent Algeria. That question may be settled at this week's F.L.N. Cabinet meeting, under Premier Benyoussef Benkhedda, which is expected to take up the draft of the peace treaty.

Meanwhile the killing continued. Last week Colonel Jean Leroy's anti-S.A.O. commando unit was nearly wiped out in its hideaway villa at El Biar on the heights above Algiers. Leroy made the bureaucratic mistake of ordering typewriters from a supply house. When the crates arrived, they contained an unexpected item--a 20-lb. dynamite bomb which exploded ten minutes after arrival, reducing the villa to four shattered Moorish pillars and a pile of rubble. The blast reportedly killed 18 of Leroy's men and four S.A.O. prisoners in the cellar.

An official admitted that the government was on the "defensive" in Algeria. A 9 o'clock curfew backfired: with the streets cleared of all ordinary traffic, the police prowl cars were fine targets for S.A.O. snipers coolly firing from apartment windows and rooftops. S.A.O. gunmen staged seven bank and payroll holdups, netting $130,000. Another S.A.O. detachment climbed to the sixth floor of the Algiers Prefecture building, blew up the state radio transmitter that was the government's main channel of communication with Paris, since both the French army and civilian radio services are heavily infiltrated by S.A.O. sympathizers.

Stop or Shoot. In France, the government still seemed to be winning its battle with the S.A.O. Paris police captured Jean Castille, 35, an Algerian ultra who had once tried to kill General Salan with a bazooka because he mistakenly thought the general was a "liberal" (TIME, Jan. 26), but who is now an S.A.O. ringleader. In Castille's hotel room, police found a list of 50 Paris addresses scheduled to be bombed during the coming weekend and 40 lbs. of plastic explosive. His seizure also led police to Marcel Bouyer, 41, former Poujadist Deputy, who is believed to be the S.A.O. chief in the Paris region.

The government announced that these and other arrests had finally "broken" the S.A.O. organization in France. But some 30,000 police are now guarding Paris, backed up by 132 light tanks and armored cars, with orders to shoot anyone who refuses to obey orders to stop. Reason: the reported dispatch from Algeria of a "large number" of S.A.O. terrorists to reestablish the disrupted network in Paris.

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