Hardly had the shock of Faure and the Froger killing been assimilated when there came a much more serious assassination attempt against the person of the Commander-in-Chief, Salan. At 6.40 p.m. on 16 January 1957, Salan had just left his office in the 10th Military Region G.H.Q., a large white building on a corner of the Place Bugeaud, right in the heart of Algiers, to attend a meeting with Lacoste. From the Gouvernement-Général, some twenty minutes later, he heard a powerful explosion, shortly followed by a white-faced secretary rushing in to announce: “It’s your office; Commandant Rodier is wounded!” Rushing back to the Place Bugeaud, Salan found his office blasted and in the next room his chef-de-cabinet, Rodier, lying dead, almost cut in two by the force of the blast. Had Salan been still at his desk he would almost certainly have shared the same fate; his ten-year-old daughter, injured by flying glass while doing her homework in the apartment above, had an even narrower escape. On investigation, Salan discovered that the explosion had been caused by two anti-tank “bazooka” projectiles, ingeniously fired from home-made tubes installed on the roof of the building opposite. One had been sighted on Salan’s office, the other on Rodier’s. Electric wires ran from them to the ground floor where the perpetrator had pressed the button, evidently on seeing the silhouette of Rodier, which he had mistaken for Salan’s. … It was immediately reckoned that the attempt was far too sophisticated for the F.L.N., and a number of suspects were rounded up among the “ultra” pieds noirs who had already emerged from the time of the anti-Mollet demonstrations.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 541