[4] Recently elected to ensure "peace in North Africa," he nevertheless implemented a repressive policy and refused to negotiate on independence until a ceasefire was reached.

[7][8] commanded by Second Lieutenant Hervé Artur, and on the Algerian side part of the Ali Khodja commando unit, several groups[9] with a total of some forty djounoud.

In October 1955, he deserted from the Hussein Dey barracks with two others, carrying with them weapons, and joined the maquis in Palestro led by Amar Ouamrane.

"[12] Hervé Artur was born in Paris on September 17, 1926; after his military service in Algeria, he prepared a philosophy degree, which he abandoned for a job in a transport company.

Only five members of the 2nd section survived the ambush: sergeant Alain Chorliet, master corporal Louis Aurousseau, and Lucien Caron.

At the moment of leaving the location of the ambush, the soldier Pierre Dumas taken prisoner, saw the elders of the neighboring village of Djerrah arrive.

[16][17][18][19][20] According to Bernard Droz [fr] and Évelyne Lever, "these mutilations were carried out by the survivors of the local population, the day after a particularly brutal ratissage, or raid.

[24] The actions of Henri Maillot, a militant from the Algerian Communist Party (PCA) who had deserted a few weeks before with a truckful of weapons, has sometimes been juxtaposed to the ambush of May 18, 1956.

Five days after the ambush, on May 21, 1956, Max Lejeune [fr], Armed Forces Secretary, sent General Henri Lorillot an instruction forbidding communication to the press of the numbers of military casualties.

Finally, a communiqué from resident minister Robert Lacoste forbade the press, without authorization, from identifying units engaged in fighting, disclosing casualties sustained by friendly forces, or the names of victims or other information "which might upset the interested families.

[27] Some clues indicate that Aurousseau and Serreau, the two soldiers who disappeared from the Artur unit, were still alive at the beginning of June 1956, prisoners of the ALN and were possibly executed in reprisal for the deaths of Zabana and Ferradj.

[1][28] According to historian Benjamin Stora, "Palestro would remain the most famous ambush of the war, a symbol of the worst that can happen: a surprise attack, impossible to defend against, mutilation of corpses.

[31] Official discourse, or in the media, associated with the "fellagha" an image of "savagery" and "fanaticism", proof of the "primitive character" of the Algerian being the ambush itself and the mutilations that accompanied it.

[34] The creation of the French village of Palestro was decreed by Napoléon III in 1869, in the centre of an alluvial plain edged by mountains 80 km south-east of Algiers.