Overview
At 17:30 on 25 July 1995, a gas cylinder packed with explosive and bolts detonated inside a carriage on RER line B at Saint-Michel–Notre-Dame, in the centre of Paris. Eight people were killed and more than a hundred injured. Over the following three months further devices were left at the Arc de Triomphe, at a Jewish school in Villeurbanne, on the TGV line near Lyon and elsewhere. The Armed Islamic Group of Algeria, the GIA, claimed the campaign.
The context was a civil war. Algeria's military had cancelled elections in January 1992 that the Islamic Salvation Front was poised to win, and the country had descended into a conflict that would kill somewhere between one and two hundred thousand people. France, as the former colonial power backing the Algerian government, was an obvious target.
The Organiser Who Went Home
French investigators identified Ali Touchent as the organiser of the French cells. He was named publicly by Algerian authorities as the GIA's European coordinator. He was the subject of a French arrest effort. He evaded it, left the country, returned to Algeria and settled in a policed district of Algiers, where he was reported killed in 1997 in circumstances the Algerian state described but did not document.
That trajectory is the foundation of the claim.
The Theory
Two former Algerian officers put their names to it. Mohamed Samraoui, a colonel in the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité — the DRS, Algeria's military intelligence service — stated that Touchent was a DRS agent tasked with infiltrating Islamist cells abroad, and that French intelligence knew it. Habib Souaïdia, a former special forces officer, published an account of the war alleging that the security services had run, provoked and in some cases carried out atrocities attributed to the insurgency.
The argument they and their supporters make is that the 1995 campaign in France was steered by Algiers rather than merely emanating from it, with two aims: to make the GIA appear so indiscriminate that international sympathy for the Islamist cause collapsed, and to force a France that had been showing signs of dialogue with the FIS back into unambiguous support for the generals.
If that is right, then the bombs at Saint-Michel were placed by people who believed they were fighting the French state, at the direction of a service working for the government the French state was backing.
What Sits on the Other Side
The men making the claim are defectors with reasons of their own, and their testimony has been given in political and legal settings — Souaïdia's in a Paris defamation trial brought against him by a former Algerian defence minister, which he won. Their accounts are consistent with each other, which is either corroboration or the natural result of a shared position.
The French courts convicted members of the network. Boualem Bensaïd and Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem received life sentences for the 1995 attacks. Those convictions rest on ordinary evidence and are not disputed by the infiltration argument, which concerns who was directing the men above them rather than who carried the bags.
President Jacques Chirac declined to receive Algerian ministers during the period and said publicly that the GIA might have been manipulated by the Algerian services — a remark that has been quoted ever since as the closest thing to official French acknowledgement.
What It Established
No French judicial finding has been made on the DRS question, and no Algerian one is likely. What exists is a documented pattern — an identified organiser who was never caught, went home, and lived in a secure quarter of the capital — and sworn accounts from inside the service that explain the pattern in a way nothing else has.