During the night of 16 November the four colonels were seized at a conspiratorial meeting near El-Kef, together with some twenty of their supporters. Altogether fifty-four suspects were rounded up on Krim’s orders, and in March the ringleaders appeared before a court-martial on Tunisian territory. The presiding judge was an austerely efficient but little-known young colonel who first appeared as Boussouf’s aide in Morocco. He had then taken over command of the Western Front where he had permitted none of the discords which had so riven its Tunisian counterpart. His name was Houari Boumedienne. The four colonels were condemned to death, and shot the following day; while the majors who had followed them, considered corrupted by their seniors, were given only two years’ imprisonment. But the sentences passed by Boumedienne were unprecedentedly harsh by (official) F.L.N. standards, and exemplary. The A.L.N.’s strong man had arrived, and from this moment on its whole character began to show a steady change.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 989