Marrakech – A peculiar law governs the Algerian regime, and Toufik Bennacer has just confirmed it anew: the men who tear down the junta’s mythology are almost never its enemies abroad. They are its own progeny – raised inside the barracks, weaned on its privileges, then spat out by the machine that made them. Not Rabat, not a foreign service, not some hostile cabal in a distant capital. The rot is laid bare, time and again, by the initiates themselves.
Across four long, unsparing interviews granted to journalist Abdou Semmar, Bennacer has shattered the omertà. He is no random malcontent. He is the son of the late General Larbi Bennacer, one of the longest-serving mandarins of Algerian military justice, and the brother of Colonel Boualem Bennacer, former consul in Alicante and ex-officer of the foreign intelligence directorate.
Hunted in France, living beneath a priority extradition demand from Algiers and the perpetual menace of kidnapping networks, this child of the sérail has converted the household secrets of the high command into a public reckoning.
Raised in the shadow of the deep state
To grasp the weight of the testimony, one must grasp the man. Born at Blida in the very bosom of the military apparatus, Bennacer grew up in the shadow of a father who entered the army in 1973, served as investigating judge and prosecutor in Blida, Oran, and Constantine, and rose to run the Central Directorate of Military Justice (DCJM) in 1999.
Trained in criminology and psychology in France and Canada, the elder Bennacer was, by his son’s account, an inflexible legalist and an architect of Algeria’s modern forensic police – until a road accident on September 1, 2005 removed the family’s protector and left his children exposed to the nomenklatura’s cruelty. Even that death, the son intimates, was never satisfactorily explained.
“We were a family,” Bennacer recalls of a childhood spent among the republic’s true masters. His roll call of VIP neighbors reads like a directory of the deep state: General Athmane Tartag, alias “Bachir,” the former intelligence chief; General Smaïn Lamari, once the sword of counter-espionage; General Abdelhamid Bouhidel of the Defense Ministry’s infrastructure directorate; General Abdelhamid Bendaoud, ex-patron of external intelligence; the Zeroual clan.
He traces his father’s intimacy with the Bouteflika household – above all Saïd, the omnipotent brother – with former police boss Ali Tounsi, and with the cabinet of the sinister General Toufik, one of the architects of a black decade that swallowed some 200,000 lives.
Yet the most corrosive portrait Bennacer draws is of Ahmed Gaïd Salah, the late chief of staff who ruled the army as a personal satrapy. His verdict is merciless. “He didn’t even know what DNA was. He confused everything,” Bennacer charges. “It was impossible to hold a remotely rational conversation with him. He could go from jovial and affable to paranoid and furious in the blink of an eye, for no reason at all.”
Behind the propaganda of a “sober” soldier, he describes a man of grotesque caprice – peacocks strutting through his residence, and a single raï tune, “Zawali ou F7el,” looping in his car while the old general swayed to it. “It was unbearable,” he remembers.
Blood in the bathroom, a coffin sealed in haste
The dark heart of the series is the death of Gaïd Salah, on the night of December 22 to 23, 2019. Here Bennacer speaks not as a pamphleteer but as a witness. He managed the logistics of the chief of staff’s private residence, an office that granted him free and permanent access to the man, his doctors, and his innermost security ring.
Summoned as the medical emergency struck, he found panic, a rescue apparatus overwhelmed, contradictory orders, and a strangely disorganized response for the de facto ruler of the country. And he found blood – great stains of it in the bathroom. “I’m no doctor,” he objects, “but you don’t vomit blood from a heart attack.” Hours earlier, the general had been on his feet, presiding over the meetings that installed Abdelmadjid Tebboune in the presidency.
What Bennacer denounces as a “suspicious death” – an assassination, a poisoning – rests on a cascade of anomalies. The principal bodyguard and personal physician were instantly isolated and silenced. The order from the ascendant power, embodied by Tebboune and General Saïd Chengriha, was categorical: no autopsy, no medico-legal examination.
Bennacer, who reached the morgue at Aïn Naâdja alongside the general’s son Adel, watched the coffin sealed at speed and the state obsequies rushed through, burying with the general any trace of a toxic hand.
Then came the purge. Gaïd Salah’s children were hounded, his lieutenants jailed, and those who had run his household – Bennacer among them – recast overnight as inconvenient witnesses to be neutralized. Such is the irony of the system: the man who imposed Tebboune was expunged from official memory the instant the earth closed over him.
A caste that devours its own
On the financial ledger, the revelations are no gentler. Bennacer describes not an army but a hermetic caste turned economic empire, feasting on defense budgets that austerity never touches. He points to General Abdelkader Lechkham, the former transmissions chief accused of siphoning nearly $2 billion through systematic overbilling of communications matériel and occult offshore accounts. And he lays bare the doctrine of the “children of the nomenklatura.”
In his own blunt formulation, when you are the son of a general in Algeria, the money comes to you – not the other way around. A surname unlocks unsecured credit, exclusive import licenses, and state land ceded for a symbolic dinar. Gaïd Salah’s own sons, Adel and Boumediene, became barons of real estate and agribusiness in the east, proprietors of flour mills, newspapers, transport firms, and domanial farmland.
Even Khaled Tebboune, a son of the president, surfaces in the notorious 701-kilogram cocaine seizure at Oran – jailed, then whitewashed at record speed. Meanwhile, the budgets of health, education, and public works are bled by austerity, while the Defense Ministry’s own remains sacrosanct and beyond the reach of the Court of Auditors.
Corruption, in this telling, is not a flaw in the machine but its very lever of control. Venality is tolerated so long as the officer stays loyal; the moment he loses a clan war, his financial dossiers are exhumed by military justice to justify his liquidation under the banner of “anti-corruption.” Fourteen heads of the intelligence services have been purged since Tebboune took office in 2020 – a frantic waltz that betrays a regime marinating in paranoia.
His own family was ground in these gears. Bennacer recounts how military security pressed his brother Boualem, the consul in Alicante, to forge documents and fabricate a case against Tebboune’s powerful chief of cabinet. The colonel refused. “I don’t give false testimony,” Boualem told him. For that scruple, he was recalled, stripped, and cast into prison in April 2024, where he languishes still.
There stands the whole indictment, and its Moroccan reader need add nothing to it: a praetorian oligarchy that devours its own, unmasked not by an adversary across the frontier but by one of its own, a man who watched the machine from within and, in the end, refused to keep its secrets.
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