2009-07-06 21:48:02 -

PARIS (AP) - A French general who worked at his country's embassy in Algiers in the 1990s has told a French investigating judge that he was told seven French monks were mistakenly killed by the Algerian army _ not by Islamist insurgents as long believed.
The kidnapping and deaths of the Trappist monks in 1996 was a psychological marker in the bloodiest years of the violence that gripped Algeria more than a decade ago. The monks had refused to leave their monastery at Tibehirine, near the town of Medea, a hotbed of violence south of Algiers in a region all but controlled by the Armed Islamic Group and deserted by large swaths of the population.
They were kidnapped by a group of Islamists early March 27, and the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, considered the most brutal insurgency movement, later claimed responsibility.
Retired Gen. Francois Buchwalter met June 25 with an investigating magistrate in the anti-terrorism section of the prosecutor's office, said he had been told that a helicopter squadron killed the monks in an air attack on a temporary camp, according to records of the meeting seen by The Associated Press.
He said he had learned of the attack while he was posted in Algeria from an Algerian military colleague and friend whose brother commanded the helicopter squadron.
Buchwalter, military attache from 1995 to 1998, met with Judge Marc Trevidic as part of a probe opened by the Paris prosecutor's office in 2004 after an unidentified witness came forward to claim that Algerian authorities were behind the kidnappings and murders.
The Rev. Armand Veilleux, No. 2 in the Trappist order, had requested that Buchwalter testify. Veilleux had identified the monks, who were later decapitated, by their heads.
«They fired on the bivouac .... Once they set down they discovered that they had fired on the monks» whose bodies «were shot through with bullets,» the general told the judge, recounting what he had been told.
Buchwalter said he passed the information obtained from his Algerian colleague several days after the monks' funeral to France's defense minister at the time, Herve de Charette, as well as to the armed forces headquarters and the French ambassador. But, he told the judge, «there was no follow-up. It was a total blackout.

The retired general's account does not tackle the issue of who kidnapped the monks in March 1996 or who eventually beheaded them. The GIA was blamed for most of the brutality in the 1990s and claimed responsibility for the kidnappings and beheadings of the monks. The claim of responsibility came two months later.
Beheadings were not uncommon during the violence, the brutality of which spared neither rural residents massacred in their sleep nor journalists, killed by the dozens. There was a flurry of allegations that the Algerian army at best failed to stop some of the violence.
Patrick Baudouin, a lawyer for families of the victims, said he plans to request that the file on the incident be made public.
President Nicolas Sarkozy, asked about the revelations _ which were first reported in the French daily Le Figaro _ at a news conference Monday, said only that he wants «justice to do its job.