On 2 May there was an appalling massacre in the port of Algiers, when a powerfully booby-trapped car exploded amid a crowd of unemployed dockers looking for work. In this one incident alone sixty-two dockers were killed and 150 horribly injured. The following day what might have been the most infamous outrage of the whole war was only narrowly averted. To the heights above the Casbah the O.A.S. had driven a petrol tanker containing over 3,000 gallons of fuel and were planning to roll it down into the crowded Muslim quarter, where it would almost certainly have caused a satanic conflagration. Only the presence of mind of a local fire brigade (including pieds noirs) forestalled the disaster.

QUESTION: The petrol tanker plot to roll burning fuel into the Casbah is a striking episode worth researching further — how close it came and what precisely stopped it.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 1613