Announcing that for every guillotined member of the F.L.N. a hundred French would be killed indiscriminately, Ramdane Abane ordered immediate reprisals. Saadi Yacef (who, on the arrest of Bitat, had taken over the Algiers network) was told to "kill any European between the ages of eighteen and fifty-four. But no women, no children, no old people.…" Between 21 and 24 June Yacef's squads roaming Algiers shot down forty-nine civilians. It was the first time that Algiers had been hit by this kind of random terrorism, and the ineluctable escalation now began here.

QUESTION: The discrepancy between pied noir claims and FLN denial of human-targeted bombs raises questions about the reliability of each side's accounts.

Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Alge…, loc. 553