General Haddad Abdelkader, head of Algerian Internal Security, married to a Spanish-Moroccan woman

Until now, the secret was well kept. No one had heard of the second marriage of General Abdelkader Haddad, alias Nacer El-Djen, the head of Internal Security who made headlines for his countless crimes committed inside the Ben-Aknoun barracks in the hills above Algiers during the Red Decade. A marriage contracted in Spain with a Spanish-Moroccan woman, according to the Muslim rite. She could not be registered in the Spanish civil registry because she did not have a certificate of celibacy. 

The civil marriage was to take place in Morocco, while our deserting colonel was settling his affairs. He had just bought a villa in Spain, paid for with the huge bonuses he had earned during the civil war. ‘Nacer El-Djen received 250,000 Algerian dinars (25 million cents) for each head shot down in cold blood outside the barracks of the Main Centre for Military Investigations, CPMI for short, and 150,000 dinars (fifteen million cents) for prisoners shot dead inside the barracks. Nacer injected psychotropic drugs before each operation. Sometimes he killed ten or twenty people in one day, shot in the head,’ says Sergeant Houari, who worked under him. 

These liquidations made him the most bloodthirsty criminal on the planet. They also made him the richest military billionaire in the Algerian army. A billionaire who has never invested a cent in his criminal enterprise. ‘He doesn't know how many people he has killed in cold blood. He killed many,’ says one of his former colleagues.

This bloodthirsty past made Nacer El-Djen fear the worst from the beginning of the hirak. With his accomplice Hocine Boulahya, another CPMI criminal, they went to Spain. There are fewer Algerians there and property is much cheaper than in France. 

The deserting colonel saw himself living a long life on the Iberian peninsula. His sinister and bloodthirsty past condemned him to never think of returning. So he had to get papers. Buying a property was not enough to obtain a residence permit. Marriage would be the ideal solution. It did not take him long to find the second half of his dreams. A Spanish woman of Moroccan origin. He could not expect anything better. For several reasons. 

The main one is that marriage to a Spanish-Moroccan woman would open two doors for him. In other words, he would kill two birds with one stone. First, he could obtain his papers without worry and even claim Spanish nationality after a few years of marriage. Secondly, he could make Morocco a country of refuge in case Algeria requested his extradition to the Spanish government. 

In Morocco, he was welcomed with open arms as a colonel in the Algerian secret services, the bearer of numerous secrets about the military hierarchy, in particular the security services. Nacer El-Djen was ready to sell himself without the slightest negotiation. His life and his future were at stake. He only had to travel to Morocco with his fiancée to celebrate the civil marriage in a Moroccan town hall, far from the eyes of the curious. 

Just when he was desperate to get back to work, Algeria, supposedly ushering in a new era free of the predators that had plunged it into the abyss of poverty, corruption, theft, nepotism and criminality of all kinds, was hijacked by a horde of lawless thugs. Abdelkader Haddad, alias Nacer El-Djen, is one of these thugs. Evidently, he has a place in this ‘New Algeria’, where arbitrariness, theft, crime and repression are the only instruments of government used by the former minions of the Bouteflika regime. The new lords of the country are more cruel than their former masters. 

Nacer El-Djen has been called upon to put a stop to the hirak and all voices raised to block the path of this ‘gang’, as his progenitor, General Ahmed Gaïd Salah, Chief of Army Staff and Deputy Minister of National Defence, has described it. He was to evolve in this ‘New Algeria’ like a fish in water. 

He was promoted to general and appointed head of Internal Security. He would become one of the magnates of a regime built on fraud and repression. He will be part of the ‘gotha’ of decision-makers, sitting on the country's High Security Council. A status he had never dreamed of, he was a petty criminal who took psychotropic drugs to kill Algerians wholesale and retail. He has an average level of education and is uneducated, having never read a book, as he boasts, which reflects the true level of those who appointed him to the highest responsibilities. 

So we should not be surprised by the news of the arrest of a network of Moroccan spies in Tlemcen, thanks to a stipendiary press acting at the behest of General Nacer El-Djen's services. As if the spies were acting in a group. Or that other alibi, in order to impose entry visas on Moroccan nationals, which claims that Israeli spy networks have infested Algeria by taking advantage of Moroccan passports without visas. However, the head of the counter-espionage apparatus was on the verge of selling out to the Moroccan secret services. His Spanish-Moroccan wife still lives in one of the properties he bought in Spain and awaits his return. Like all members of the Algerian power gang, Nacer El-Djen always keeps a door open for a possible escape in the worst case scenario.