La Main Rouge

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La Main Rouge (English: The Red Hand) was a French terrorist organization operated by the French foreign intelligence agency Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service), or SDECE, in the 1950s. Its purpose was to eliminate the supporters of Algerian independence and the leading members of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) during the Algerian War.^[1]

The assassination of the Tunisian labor unionist and independence activist Farhat Hached on December 5, 1952 is attributed to La Main Rouge.^[1]

Several bomb attacks took place in West Germany, like the assassination attempts on the arms dealer Otto Schlüter on 26 September 1956 and 3 June 1957, and the killing of Georg Puchert (alias Captain Morris), another German arms dealer, on 3 March 1959. These cases would ultimately never be solved.^[2]

On 27 November 1959, 30-year-old Christian Durieux gave an interview in which he claimed the attempts against the lives of Schlüter and Puchert and the bomb attack in the port of Hamburg against the cargo ship Atlas on 1 October 1958, were all carried out on behalf of La Main Rouge. He also claimed responsibility for the assassination of FLN official Améziane Aït Ahcène in Bonn, in November 1958.^[2][3]

The ambassador of the Algerian FLN in West Germany, the above mentioned Aït Ahcène, was shot from a moving car on November 5, 1958 in Bonn and died months later in a Tunisian hospital.^[4] The attack is attributed to La Main Rouge.^[5]

The freighters Emma, en route from Tangier to Gibraltar on 30 July 1957, and Alkaira, in Ostend on 13 April 1959, were destroyed by explosive charges planted by La Main Rouge.^[2][6]

In particular, the apparent inaction of the French authorities was seen abroad as a tacit admission by the French government that it had caused the aggressive crackdown on supporters of the FLN.^[7]