ALGIERS (AFP) - The 19-year-old son of a businessman kidnapped and found dead in Algeria's restive Kabylie region this month was killed by three friends, two of whom have now been arrested, police said on Thursday.
The third suspect "will be arrested in a very short time," the regional commander of the national police said at a news conference at Tizi Ouzou, the main city in Kabylie, 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of the capital Algiers.
"The victim died from strangulation after being beaten in a house that is under construction," the APS news agency quoted the unidentified officer as saying.
The body of Ghilas Hadjou was found buried near a beach in Tizi Ouzou where militants linked to Al-Qaeda are active, newspaper reports said.
His body, which was found on Wednesday evening, bore signs of strangulation, they added.
Two friends allegedly involved in the murder, aged 19 and 25, were arrested on Wednesday "with the help of citizens and information provided by the victim's mobile sim card," said the officer, adding the case "has nothing to do with terrorism."
Hadjou, the son of a businessman from the coastal town of Azeffoun northeast of Tizi Ouzou, was abducted on October 18 on a road linking Azeffoun to his village of Mellata.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which stems from a group started in the late 1990s by radical Algerian Islamists, is active in Kabylie where some 70 people have been kidnapped since 2005.
According to reports, most of the hostages have since been freed in return for ransom payments, although this has never been confirmed by the authorities.
At the end of last year, the security forces dismantled a gang of criminals linked to abductions in Kabylie, whose members claimed to be AQIM militants who had set up checkpoints near Azeffoun to abduct victims.
Earlier Thursday an Algerian court sentenced to death eight men for murdering a businessman, APS reported, adding that some of them had confessed to being Al-Qaeda members.
The trial lasted only three days, involving 14 defendants, six of whom claimed AQIM affiliation, the news agency said.
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