Ali Alliche wears the scars of the massacre that decimated his family on his throat, neck and shoulder where the executioners' knife and bullets missed their mark.
Stooped, haggard and spotted with paint, Alliche is rebuilding his once gracious villa, bombed and half gutted by fire. He is hiding all traces of the Aug. 28 slaughter that took 15 loved ones, and trying to conceal the wounds still searing his heart."I try to forget it," Alliche, 53, said wearily. "Thanks to God I'm alive with the rest of my family.
"I'm reborn."
The massacre in Sidi Rais, 12 miles southwest of Algiers, was the worst single episode of carnage here since the start of an Islamic insurgency that in less than six years has taken Algeria to the outer edge of the imaginable.
An estimated 75,000 people have been killed in violence and counter-violence by insurgents and security forces. But the plunge into massacres has given a new dimension to the conflict: wanton savagery that climaxed with the late-night raid by armed men on Rais. More than 300 people died. Some reports put the death toll at 500.
In the Alliche household, 13 people were killed: his wife, two sons, including a 4-year-old whose throat was slit, his father, a brother, a sister, nieces and nephews. The attackers kidnapped his sister-in-law and his 17-year-old niece.
Alliche's wife was spirited out and killed down the road.
"It's God. It's who commands," said Alliche when asked how he survived.
The Rais massacre and a mass slaughter three weeks later in Bentalha fueled speculation that elements of Algeria's military-backed regime somehow had a hand in the violence. Each town has at least one army barracks nearby, but soldiers showed up only after the blood was spilled.
Barracks can be seen from the upstairs terrace of Alliche's villa. A gendarme accompanying a reporter throughout the visit to Rais, as required by authorities, pointed to the flag marking the army post.
But Gen. Mohamed Lamari, the army chief, denied in an October interview with the army's monthly "El Djeich" that his forces had any role in massacres.
Rais, population about 3,000, is one of a string of dusty bedroom communities south of the capital heading toward the Mitidja Plain, the haunt of the Armed Islamic Group. The rebels, trying to create a state based on a strict reading of Islamic law, claimed responsibility for this and other massacres.
The Armed Islamic Group has no known program. But it denounces as "infidels" Algeria's rulers and their supporters.
"That's why it follows the traces of those apostates in the cities, villages and deserts and then wipes them out and destroys their fields," read the communique taking responsibility for massacres in Rais and elsewhere.
Accounts by survivors conflict, but, according to some, a band of about 150 men descended on Rais shortly before midnight, fanning out in several neighborhoods.
About a dozen men armed with bombs, knives, guns and hammers attacked the Alliche home at 12:05 a.m.
Alliche tilts his head up to show the gash across his throat and unbuttons his shirt collar to reveal sutured knife slashes on the back of his neck and shoulders.
His left hand is in a splint. A patch covers two bullet wounds in his left shoulder, hit by gunfire when he tried to drop a brick on the attackers from the third-floor terrace.
Minutes later, they were on him.
"He put my head on his knee to slit my throat," Alliche said, standing on the terrace where he fought for his life.
Alliche showed how he struggled to free himself then was drag-ged to the terrace wall.
"He told his friend, `We're here to cut off his head or throw him off the terrace,"' Alliche said. His son somehow intervened, saving his life.
From Alliche's terrace, the army barracks is visible across a field, about 800 yards away. But neither Alliche nor others interviewed questioned why soldiers showed up only after the three to four hours of bloodshed ended.
Security forces' failure to act is one of the enduring mysteries of the massacres. Allegations of at least passive complicity have been neither proven nor disproved. Those who make such charges cite various possible reasons ranging from an effort to turn the population against Islamic militants to a bid to grab land in the fertile Mitidja Plain.
Two men from inside Algeria's intelligence apparatus, quoted recently in the London newspaper The Observer and France's Le Monde, charged that military security had a role in some massacres and other killings.
People interviewed here were of another mind. The surviving men in the Alliche family have joined the Patriots, self-defense groups armed by the government, and, like many, contend that attackers mine target areas before moving in, hindering rescuers.
Mohamed Alliche, a married son who lives next door where two people were killed, said soldiers were ambushed by attackers in the nearby field. Another neighbor, Yahia Aboubi, said his family escaped to the army post - in the same field. Only one relative was killed.
Confusion ripens into chaos in the aftermath of a massacre, and the present alone seems clear.