Assassination of Mohamed Boudiaf

Assassination of Mohamed Boudiaf
Part of Algerian Civil War
LocationAnnaba, Algeria
Date29 June 1992
TargetMohamed Boudiaf
Attack type
Political assassination
Weapons
Deaths1 (Mohamed Boudiaf)
Injuredat least 40 killed or wounded
PerpetratorLambarek Boumaarafi
MotiveRevenge for the 1992 Algerian coup d'état

The assassination of Mohamed Boudiaf took place on 29 June 1992. As Chairman of the High Council of Algeria, Boudiaf was killed by one of his own bodyguards, Lambarek Boumaarafi, who was presented officially as an Islamic fundamentalist, and a sympathiser of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), who acted alone. He was assassinated in Annaba while addressing a public meeting on June 29, 1992, which was later broadcast on national TV.

He received three bullets, two in the head and one in his back.[1] He was president for only five months, after his return from exile in Morocco to rule over the High Council of State (HCE) that emerged as a constitutional alternative to the Islamic State declared by the FIS after winning 1991 first democratic elections in the country since its independence in 1962. His mission was to crush the FIS, stop the civil war and restore order.[2]

Boudiaf was one of the few veterans of the Algerian War still alive at the time. After Krim Belkacem, assassinated in Frankfurt 1970, and Mohamed Khider assassinated in Madrid in 1967, and Mohammed Seddik Benyahia the foreign minister assassinated on the Iran–Iraq border when working on a walk out from the First Gulf War.

  1. ^ New light is thrown on Boudiaf's murder: The fundamentalists may not be behind the president's death, writes Robert Fisk in Algiers [1] Archived 2015-09-25 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ "Operation Boudiaf". Archived from the original on 2013-11-05. Retrieved 2013-11-05.