NICOSIA -- As France's tense relations with Algeria worsened Wednesday, Algeria's radical Armed Islamic Group, which carried out the hijack of an Air France airliner, said it had killed four Catholic priests after the hijack was ended.


The priests, three Frenchmen and a Belgian, were killed in Algeria on Tuesday, the day after French commandos stormed the airliner at Marseilles.


The Islamic group said in a statement faxed to news organizations that the priests died as part of a campaign of "annihilation and physical liquidation of Christian crusaders."


The group, which has emerged as one of Algeria's most hardline Moslem fundamentalist factions, said the priests were killed after four of its own "soldiers" died in the hijack.


Although France averted a catastrophe by storming the plane in Marseilles Monday and killing the hijackers, Algerian officials and media assailed the French handling of the drama.


The pro-government Algerian newspaper L'Authentique questioned whether Paris "manipulated" the affair to get the hijackers to fly to France where they could be killed. It noted Interior Minister Abderahmane Meziane-Cherif's claim that the Air France pilot blocked a plan to release everyone but six members of the crew while the plane was still in Algiers.


It also said it was suspicious that the terrorists were all in the cockpit at the moment of the assault, and why they didn't go ahead and blow up the plane they had rigged with explosives. The independent El Watan called it "abnormal, even indecent, that the French seize on the incident to turn with derision to the Algerian authorities."


France suspended air and sea links with Algeria Tuesday, demanding that Algeria improve the poor security that allowed the gunmen, disguised as maintenance personnel, to get on the plane as passengers were boarding.


A merchant marine union in Marseilles sought Wednesday in a letter to Transport Minister Bernard Bosson to have north Africa declared a danger zone "as it was during the Gulf War."


More than 11,000 people have been killed in the past three years in clashes between Algeria's military-installed government -- tacitly supported by France -- and Islamic fundamentalists.


French officials continued questioning ex-hostages, conducting ballistic examinations inside the plane and taking fingerprints to identify the three accomplices of hijack leader Abdallah Yahia.


French officials are keen to establish any links Yahia and his team may have had with other organizations in planning what French Interior Minister Charles Pasqua called a "suicide mission" to explode the plane over Paris.


(Reuters, AP)