On 24 April, despite Germaine Tillion's endeavours of the previous year to halt the chain of executions, Yacef's bomb-manufacturer, Taleb Abderrahmane, and two other convicted terrorists were guillotined in Algiers. In advance of the execution, El Moudjahid had warned that henceforth "each Algerian patriot to mount the scaffold signifies one French prisoner before the firing squad". On 9 May the F.L.N. Press office in Tunis announced that three French soldiers had been sentenced to death by a special A.L.N. tribunal on charges of torture, rape and murder. The unfortunate soldiers had already been in F.L.N. hands for over eighteen months and, far from there having been any semblance of a "fair trial", it appeared, for want of other evidence, that they had simply been selected at random and killed. The French reaction, both in France and Algeria, was one of profound shock and horror. For the army, it was the missing detonator.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 831