Groupe Charles-Martel
The Groupe Charles-Martel (also known as the Charles Martel Club ) was a right-wing anti - Arab French terrorist organization . She was active in the 1970s and 1980s. The group was named after the Frankish caretaker Karl Martell , who defeated an Arab-Muslim army in the battle of Tours and Poitiers in 732 .
The attacks were primarily directed against the property, especially businesses, of Algerians and French of Algerian descent. Algerian government facilities as well as mosques and religious institutions owned by Muslims were also attacked. In May 1980, after an attack, the group declared that it was also targeting “the [Catholic and Protestant] Church, the Jews , the hungry people of the Third World ”.
The group cited an enmity between the two peoples that arose in the Algerian War (1954–1962). Algeria had been a French colony or part of mainland France for over a hundred years. In the particularly bloody war of independence, Algeria was able to free itself from the French colonial power. Several Algerians of European descent ( pieds-noirs ) then fled to France.
attacks
- Dec. 14, 1973 - Bomb attack on the Algerian consulate in Marseille. Four Algerians were murdered and 20 injured.
- Mar. 02 , 1975 - Bombings on Air Algérie offices in Toulouse and Lyon . Nobody was injured.
- April 1, 1975 - A car bomb explodes outside the Algerian embassy in Paris . Nobody was injured. The GCM wanted to protest against the state visit of the French President in Algeria.
- December 24, 1976 - Prince Jean de Broglie , who negotiated the Evian treaties for Algeria's independence in 1962, is assassinated.
- Nov. 1, 1977 - Two Algerians kidnapped in Paris to protest the kidnapping of French people in Mauritania . However, the Algerians are later released.
- December 2, 1977 - The guard of the Amicale des Algériens in Paris, Laïd Sebaï , is murdered.
- Jan. 10, 1978 - Machine gun attack on a dormitory for migrant workers in Nice . Nobody gets hurt.
- Apr. 24, 1980 - Attack from the Protestant student residence in Paris with four injured.
- May 4, 1978 - The communist politician and anti-colonialist activist Henri Curiel is assassinated.
- May 07, 1980 - Bomb attack against the association des étudiants musulmans nord-Africains in Paris. Nobody was injured.
- May 11, 1980 - Bomb attack on the Algerian consulate in Aubervilliers . Nobody was injured.
- Dec. 20, 1981 - Bomb attack on an office of the Polish company Botrans . Nobody was injured. This attack was interpreted as an anti-communist signal after the election of the left-wing President François Mitterrand .
- Feb. 18, 1982 - Molotov cocktail attack on a mosque in Montpellier . Nobody was injured.
- Feb. 22, 1982 - Gun attack on a bar popular with Maghrebians . Three people were injured.
- May 06, 1982 - Explosives attack on a mosque in Romans-sur-Isere . Nobody gets hurt.
- March 14, 1983 - Two children are injured in a bomb attack in Marseille, in which the bomb was thrown from a passing motor scooter.
- Aug. 9, 1983 - Air Algérie bombing in Marseille. Nobody was injured.
- On June 20, 1991 a Commando Charles-Martel confessed to a bomb attack on an Algerian club in Paris. However, this trace could never be confirmed, which is why the French authorities assume that the group has not been active since 1983/84.
In January 1974, the then French President Georges Pompidou also received a tract from the group in which the group’s acts of violence with reference to the “invasion” of France by the immigration of Algerians and the “occupation of our soil by completely non-assimilable ethnic groups no qualitative added value "was justified.