Former members of the GSPC, the last remaining Islamic rebel group in Algeria, report that last year, the founder and leader of the group, Hassan Hattab, was tried for "heresy and treason" by his key subordinates, and then shot to death. Hattab was killed because he wanted to negotiate an end of the violence with the government. One of the men who killed him, Amari Saifi, took a group of GSPC men to southern Algeria, where they kidnapped 32 European tourists, extracted six million dollars in ransom from the German government, and were recently caught in Chad. The GSPC is itself a splinter group of the GIA, which has made peace with the government in 1998. The GSPC split off in 1998 to protest the GIA decision to stop the rebellion.