Algeria / Security services launch sensitization endeavour to persuade suicide bombers to surrender and seek repentance

Sources told Echorouk that the Algerian security services have engaged, over the past few days, in a campaign aimed at sensitizing the families of those terrorists, still in the mountains, to the imperious necessity of persuading them to give themselves up and seek repentance.

•  To this affect, elements of the National Gendarmerie have visited numerous families of wanted terrorists urging them to convince their sons or relatives who have joined the terrorists’ ranks to relinquish violence and surrender before it is too late. 
• These families, who reiterated their opposition to and condemnation of the latest terrorist bombings which mowed down innocent lives, declared to the Gendarmerie elements that they would do their utmost to convince their sons and relatives to shun terrorism and to reintegrate peacefully the Algerian society.
• These families were also told that the Algerian state was still keeping the door of repentance open to those led astray who are eager to forsake terrorist violence, all together, in order to benefit from clemency measures enshrined in the national charter for peace and national reconciliation.
• Some of the sensitized families said that many of these terrorists wanted to shun violence but are expecting only solid guarantees of clemency from the state authorities in the framework of the national reconciliation policy.
• In a separate development, former disbanded “Patriots” in several parts of Algeria have expressed in a message to the authorities their intention to take up again the struggle against terrorism.
• They said that they were only waiting for the official green light from the authorities concerned in order to resume the counter-terrorism struggle in all the troubled regions of the country.