La Main Rouge

La Main Rouge (The Red Hand) was a terrorist organization operated by the foreign Department of the French External Documentation and Counter-Espionage Service (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage, SDECE) in the 1950s, which pursued the goal to eliminate the supporters of Algerian independence and the leading members of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) during the Algerian War.

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

On 27 November 1959, the then 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, all on behalf of La Main Rouge. He also claimed responsibility for the assassination of FLN official Aït Ahcène in Bonn, in November 1958.

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.

In particular, the apparent inaction of the French authorities was seen abroad as a note of the French Government that they had caused the aggressive crackdown on supporters of the FLN.