Algeria is trying to humiliate France, France’s interior minister said on Friday, after several Algerian influencers were arrested for inciting violence in a growing crisis between Paris and its former colony.
Four Algerian influencers supportive of Algerian authorities have been arrested in recent days over videos that are suspected of calling for violent acts in France.
Meanwhile, Algeria has also been holding on national security charges French-Algerian novelist Boualem Sansal, a major figure in modern francophone literature, who was arrested at Algiers airport in November.
“Algeria is seeking to humiliate France,” Bruno Retailleau said on a visit to the western city of Nantes.
“Algeria is currently holding a great writer — Boualem Sansal — who is not only Algerian but also French. Can a great country, a great people allow itself to keep in detention for the wrong reasons someone who is old and sick?”
Turning to the influencers, he said it was “out of the question to give a free pass to these individuals who spread hatred and anti-Semitism”.
“I think we have reached an extremely worrying threshold with Algeria,” he said, adding France “cannot tolerate” an “unacceptable situation.”
“While keeping our cool (…) we must now consider all the means we have at our disposal with regards to Algeria,” he added.
One of those arrested is “Doualemn”, a 59-year-old influencer who was detained in the southern city of Montpellier after a video posted on TikTok.
He was deported on a plane to Algeria Thursday afternoon, according to his lawyer, but was sent back to France the same evening as Algeria had banned him from its territory.
On Thursday, Sofia Benlemmane, a Franco-Algerian woman in her fifties, was also arrested, Lyon prosecutors said.
Followed by more than 300,000 people, she is accused of spreading hate messages and threats against Internet users and against opponents of the Algerian authorities, as well as insulting statements about France.
Arrested in Brest on January 3, Youcef A., 25, known as “Zazou Youssef” on TikTok, will be tried on February 24 on charges of justifying terrorism.
Placed in pretrial detention, he faces seven years in prison if convicted.
And “Imad Tintin”, 31, was taken into police custody on Saturday in Grenoble for a video, since removed, in which he called for “burning alive, killing and raping on French soil”. He will be tried on March 5 for incitement to acts of terrorism.
Algeria won independence from France in 1962 after a ferocious over seven year war that is still the subject of trauma for both sides.
French extreme-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, a veteran of that conflict who died this week aged 96, drew a lot of his initial support from the so called “pieds-noirs” (black feet) — French who left Algeria for France when colonial rule ended.
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