43Years since the death of Houari Boumediene, the Algerian president whom Saddam "killed" with poison when he was planning to assassinate Hassan II
The relationship of the former Algerian President, Houari Boumediene, with the late King Hassan II was not an ordinary antagonism that could end with reconciliation or be folded by time. A “doctrine” inherited by those who succeeded in ruling Algeria in succession and implemented its agenda centered mainly on the Sahara, “as the book says,” even after the Moroccan monarch left life in 1999.
And if Omar Al-Mukhtar, the leader of the resistance in Libya at the time of the Italian occupation, had said before his execution, “My life will be longer than Shanqi’s,” Hassan II would be right if he said, “My life will be longer than the life of the one who tried to assassinate me,” because Muhammad Ibrahim Boukhrouba, Who will be better known by his nom de guerre, Houari Boumediene, who turns forty-third under the dirt tomorrow, will bid farewell to life in a mysterious way while trying to assassinate the man who, throughout his leadership of Algeria, saw him as his first, and perhaps only, enemy.
Carlos and al-Dulaimi and the plan to assassinate the king
The issue of Boumediene’s desire to liquidate Hassan II was a story that was frequently repeated by tongues among the closed councils that “Nostalgia” was attracted to during the Moroccan-Algerian conflict in the seventies, but it did not find its way to the official platforms or to the media as a “hypothesis” without evidence, and even if there was this The evidence has not yet emerged from the basements of the intelligence services, or that those who lived during that period preferred silence so as not to pour more controversy over the fire of a conflict that has been renewed from time to time.
But in 2017, the French writer Laszlo Lisicki will set off a big surprise, when his book “The World as Carlos Sees It” was published, which is the memoirs of “Carlos the Fox” and whose real name is Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, a Venezuelan whom his fans see as a “resistive and revolutionary duck” while his haters see him. A terrorist and a murderer, a mercenary.” In the pages of the book, Carlos will confirm that Boumediene chose him to carry out the assassination of King Hassan II, which he wanted to take place on Moroccan soil.
Carlos says that Boumediene personally chose him from among 3 candidates to carry out this operation, which was to be coordinated on two fronts, the first is an Algerian led by Saleh Hijab, the commander of the Central Commission, whom the book described as a "former brigand and a hired killer", and the second is Moroccan through an "agent" in Morocco who was Only Carlos and Hijab know his identity, and the surprise is that it was none other than General Ahmed al-Dulaimi, the closest military leader to King Hassan II.
Carlos tells that the plan was to be implemented by two groups of professional killers, each of them working separately from the other, and they had to watch the moment the king left Rabat through a road between two roads called the first blue road and on it the first and second divisions were stationed on the red road, which was The second squad is watching him, but the passage to the implementation phase failed 3 times, before the plan was finally canceled by order of fate upon the death of Boumediene himself on December 27, 1978.
Boumediene's death .. a quick and mysterious "assassination"
The news of Boumediene's death was surprising and shocking. The 48-year-old man, who was suffering from nothing shortly before his departure from life, will begin the first symptoms of his illness after returning from a trip that led him to Iraq to meet its President Saddam Hussein, and then to Syria to meet Hafez al-Assad, in September of In 1978, during which he was accompanied by his advisor, Ahmed Al-Talib Al-Ibrahimi, and his foreign minister, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, but the latter would confirm that the president's poor health condition would appear before his arrival in Algeria, specifically when he was in Damascus from Baghdad.
Algerian doctors could not give an accurate diagnosis of Boumediene's fatigue and pain, but they suggested that he had bladder cancer, and on September 29 of the same year he will travel to Moscow for treatment, and he will remain there for a month and a half, to return to his country on November 14 In the hope that he will make a final recovery at his home, but a few days later the situation will become worse than it was before, which necessitated his admission to a hospital in the capital, where he will bid farewell to life on December 27 before being buried on December 29 in the Al-Alia Cemetery.
His death has remained an unresolved mystery to this day, and what will provide the matter with ambiguity is the talk of his wife, Anisa Boumediene, in 2005, that her husband's medical file was classified as "secret", before she commented, in a statement published by the Egyptian newspaper "Youm Seven", "I do not I rule out that he was assassinated,” which was also mentioned more clearly by his successor in the presidency, Chadli Bendjedid, who said in 2007 that the death of the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat in 2004 “is similar to the death of Boumediene,” referring to their assassination together with slow poison.
And this assassination hypothesis will become stronger in 2008, and Saddam Hussein will become the first suspect in it, when Hamid al-Jubouri, the former Iraqi foreign minister, said that Boumediene was “poisoned” while he was in Baghdad, highlighting, during his participation in the “Witness to the Age” program on the channel "Al-Jazeera", that his body wasting, his bones fragility, and his hair loss are all symptoms he saw similar to people who died in Iraq after being exposed to "lithium" poison.
Hassan II and the "emptiness" of the opponent's departure
Fate has amazing rulings, one of which may be Boumediene’s death, or his “assassination” in a more correct sense if the stories that spoke of his poisoning are true. While he was planning hard to end his opponent’s life, he found himself leading him to the finish line by 21 years, and whatever the truth of his death, it was destined for Hassan II that He watches the funeral of his "arch-enemy" and sends a telegram of condolences on the death of the man whom he once said was "double in character" and that he "imposes an effort on his addressee to decipher his words".
But the long rivalry between the two men did not push Hassan II to express any kind of comfort over his departure. In his dialogue with French journalist Eric Laurent, published in the book “Memory of a King” issued by the “Middle East” Foundation, he will talk about his feelings after Boumediene’s death, saying, “We used to fight a lot. We competed and raced to excel on the chessboard, so that with the difference we almost resembled the duo formed in the past by Charles Kent and Francois I.
Hassan II explains this feeling, which may seem strange, by saying, "I feel an emptiness after Boumediene's death, because we both used to look at the other and say complimentingly: Hello, you scored a goal against me, yet things almost turned into an unfortunate one."
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