Paul Aussaresses: The man behind death squads in Algeria Gen. Paul Aussaresses, who stunned France in 2000 when he asserted that he cold-bloodedly tortured and summarily executed dozens of prisoners during his country's brutal colonial war in Algeria decades earlier, died Tuesday in La Vancelle, France. He was 95. His death was announced on the website of a veterans" group, Who Dares Wins. Algeria's fight from 1954 to 1962 to break free of French colonial rule was a complex conflict characterized by urban guerrilla warfare, terrorism and, on both sides, torture. During the conflict France denied that it tortured, and it censored newspapers, books and movies that said that it did. Afterward, official secrecy, propaganda and a general distaste for the subject kept discussion of French atrocities muted. Then, in December 2000, Mr. Aussaresses, one of France's top officers in Algeria, gave an interview to Le Monde in which he said that torture had been routine and condoned by the French leadership as the fastest way to get information about guerrilla activities. The next year he expanded on that account with the publication of a book, Special Services: Algeria 1955-57. An English translation appeared in 2002, titled Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria, 1955-57. The book is graphic in its details. The general wrote of beating prisoners; of attaching electrodes to their ears or testicles and gradually increasing the intensity of the electrical charge; of pouring water over their faces until they either spoke or drowned. Whether a captive talked or not, he said, he usually had him executed anyway, often doing the job himself. He coolly recalled rounding up 1,500 unarmed prisoners - almost all of them Muslims - then selecting "the diehards" and having them shot. He had the bodies taken to a Muslim cemetery and laid side by side facing Mecca in a 100-metre ditch that a backhoe had dug. Lime was shovelled onto the bodies to hasten decomposition. He set up death squads, he said, and called them by that name. He ordered the assassinations of Algerian leaders and ordered the killings be disguised as suicides. When he got word Ahmed Ben Bella, the leader of the independence struggle and later Algeria's first elected president, was aboard an airplane, he ordered it shot down, then changed his mind when he learned that the crew was French. Gen. Aussaresses insisted that the torture and the summary killings were a matter of policy. He wrote everything down, he said, and briefed Gen. Jacques Massu, his superior, every day. He suggested, but did not prove, that François Mitterrand, who was justice minister at the time, had known about the torture through his representative in Algiers. Mr. Mitterrand was elected president of France in 1981. It was hardly news that the French had relied on atrocities to grind down urban guerrillas; as early as 1955, a French magazine referred to "Our Gestapo in Algeria." But as part of their 1962 peace negotiations, both France and the leaders of newly independent Algeria agreed to play down the ugliness. In 1968, France granted a blanket amnesty to those who served in Algeria, no matter what crimes they may have committed there. It was only in 1999 that France officially recognized the combat with Algeria as a war; until then it had been called an operation to maintain order. By then, for many French, the war was a distant memory or a chapter in a history book. But in 2000 the past returned. In July, an Algerian woman, Louisette Ighilahriz, wrote in Le Monde of being tortured, raped and kept in filth for three months by her French captors. In December, Le Monde published Gen. Aussaresses" interview. Then came his book and an admission by Gen. Massu that he, too, had employed torture regularly. Gen. Aussaresses's assertions and the sheer brazenness with which he made them set off a furor. The president at the time, Jacques Chirac, said he was "horrified." "The full truth must come out about these unjustifiable acts," he said. Nothing can justify them. The president stripped Aussaresses of his rank and his Legion of Honour medal and forbade him to wear his military uniform. Although the amnesty protected him from being tried for his acts, he was nonetheless convicted of "trying to justify war" and fined. The European Court overturned the conviction, partly on free-speech grounds. Paul Aussaresses Jr. was born in St.-Paul-Cap-de-Joux, France, on Nov. 7, 1918, only days before World War I ended. At the time, his father was serving in the French army. Paul Jr. began his military service as a recruit in North Africa, then volunteered to parachute into France behind German lines, where he organized local resistance. Information about his survivors was not immediately available. In an article in Soldier of Fortune magazine in 2001, Aussaresses recounted the first time he tortured a prisoner, in 1955. The prisoner had killed a man with an axe, he said, and the victim, before dying, identified his assailant. Gen. Aussaresses tortured the prisoner to death. "I thought of nothing," he recalled. I had no remorse for his death. If I regretted anything, it was that he refused to talk before he died. He had used violence against a person who was not his enemy. He got what he deserved.