Algeria issues arrest warrants for activists accused of "terrorism"

A court in Algiers has issued four international arrest warrants for four suspected radical Islamists accused of manoeuvring to turn the popular peaceful protest movement against the Hirak military regime into a violent one.

According to media reports, the warrant was issued on Sunday against former diplomat Mohamed Larbi Zeitout, blogger Amir Boukhors - known as "Amir Dz" - journalist Hichem Aboud and a former gendarme named Abdallah Mohamad, who is on the Youtube social network.

Zeitout, 57, is one of their main leaders. He was posted to the Algerian embassy in Libya in 1991. Then, in 1995, he went into exile in London after resigning from the diplomatic service. According to the international daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Zeitout, who is located in Spain on the basis of his videos, belongs to the Islamist group Rachad, founded in 2007 in exile and accused of being a cell of former members of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) trying to infiltrate society in order to radicalise anti-regime protests. 

The armed wing of the FIS was one of the most violent and bloodthirsty terrorist groups of the civil war that bloodied Algeria in the 1990s, leaving thousands dead and more than 300,000 missing.

According to the authorities, Rachad brings together former militants of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS, dissolved in March 1992). This movement is accused of wanting to infiltrate and drag into the violence the pro-democracy Hirak movement, which was born in February 2019 and which peacefully calls for a radical change of political "system" in the country.

The Algerian ex-diplomat is being prosecuted for the alleged crime of "management and financing of a terrorist group", as well as conspiracy and money laundering, according to information released by the local state news agency APS. 

Blogger Amir Dz, 38, who has published several videos critical of the military regime and the Algerian government, and journalist Hichem Aboud, 65, who was reportedly linked to the local secret services in the past, live in France and are accused of armed gang membership and money laundering. 

As for Hichem Aboud, he presents himself as a former member of the Algerian secret services (DRS). Last February, he was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment for rebellion and disorderly conduct. He fled Algeria via Tunisia in August 2013 while he was banned from leaving the country.

According to the official statement, "preliminary technical investigations" suggest that Aboud, Boukhors and Abdallah Mohamad were involved in a conspiracy to change the peaceful nature of the Hirak protests to violence, and that Ahmed Mansouri, a former FIS member arrested a month ago, was also part of it.

While the first three defendants are very prolific on social media, especially since the start of the Hirak, Abdellah Mohamed is less known to the general public, although he has created a YouTube channel.

On the other hand, the same prosecutor requested on Sunday that a certain Ahmed Mansouri, a former Islamist militant, arrested on 28 February and since then remanded in custody, be the subject of an arrest warrant.

Mansouri, a former member of the FIS, "joined terrorist groups and was sentenced to death in 1994 before benefiting from the provisions of the Civil Concord", according to the statement from the prosecutor of the Bir Mourad Rais court in Algiers.

The "technical investigations" also confirmed that Ahmed Mansouri had established contacts with Amir Dz, Hichem Aboud and Mohamed Abdellah in order to "implement plans to undermine public order, including the exploitation of the Hirak (...) so that it abandons its peaceful character", according to the statement.

The Algerian court action comes at a time when Hirak is once again mobilising thousands of Algerians on the streets every week against the regime, while President Abdelmadjid Tebboune has called legislative elections for 12 June.

The government is considering stripping Algerian citizens of their citizenship if they commit "acts detrimental to the interests of the state" abroad, according to a draft law presented earlier this month by the justice minister. According to critics, this initiative aims to "silence refractory voices from abroad", particularly YouTubers.