Mulhouse: France Blames Algeria Rather Than Look at Itself

Lyes Merabet — Genève, Suisse — 2026-09-06

In its edition of 22 February 2025, Le Figaro, under the byline of Elisabeth Pierson, set the tone from its very headline: "Terrorist attack in Mulhouse: Algeria refused, 'on ten occasions,' to take back its national under an OQTF removal order, blasts Retailleau." On TF1, the interior minister assured viewers that "once again, migratory disorder lay at the origin of this attack." A man has just died, police officers are seriously wounded — and the French government's first reaction is to point the finger at Algiers. Before following that line of reasoning, let us begin with what matters most: a tribute to Lino Sousa Loureiro, 69, a Portuguese national who arrived in France in 1992 and was killed in Mulhouse for coming to the aid of others. A human tragedy, first. Only then, the truth of the facts.

Who was the attacker, Brahim Abdessemed, 37, born on 20 April 1987 in Batna? A man who arrived in France in 2014 — eleven years before the attack — flagged in the FSPRT, the French file on radicalisation; convicted in December 2023 by the French courts to six months in prison for glorifying terrorism, with a ban from French territory; placed, upon his release, in the Strasbourg-Geispolsheim administrative detention centre in March 2024; freed on 19 June 2024 by the judge of liberties and detention — a French magistrate — then placed under house arrest with judicial supervision, required to report to the police station every day. Add that his psychiatric profile was known: a "schizophrenic profile," the minister himself would later say, conceding that "the individual's psychiatric dimension is undoubtedly another line of explanation."

Re-read that timeline: it is damning — for France. Convicted by a French court, watched by the French police, flagged by the French services, freed by a French judge, followed by French psychiatrists: in none of these steps does Algeria appear a single time. On the day of the attack, the man was at liberty because a French court had so decided, and under surveillance because the French state had chosen to keep him in France under judicial supervision rather than place him in detention or in care. One may deplore that choice; one cannot bill it to Algiers. Accusing Algeria of having "refused him" amounts to blaming a neighbour for failing to clear out of the house a piece of furniture the owner himself decided to keep — behind a broken lock.

And those famous "refusals," moreover, do not even agree with one another. Retailleau speaks of "ten occasions"; Prime Minister François Bayrou, a few days later, puts the figure at "fourteen" laissez-passer requests. Ten, fourteen: the French executive cannot agree with itself over its own indictment. Above all, the interior ministry's own data contradict the picture of an Algeria that "refuses everything": in 2024, Algiers accepted 42% of France's requests for consular laissez-passer; Algerians have been the leading nationality removed from France since 2022, with 3,000 removals in 2024 and 2,539 in 2025. In other words: cooperation exists, it is quantified, it is continuous — and it cannot be reduced to a single case, however painful.

France admits as much, when politics does not command otherwise. On 19 May 2026, on a visit to Algiers, French Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin praised the "perfect collaboration on counter-terrorism" between the two countries, paying tribute to the Algerian services that help Paris, in his own words, "to gather intelligence, carry out arrests and prevent attacks" — and he noted in passing the contribution of the Algerian services to securing the Paris Olympic Games. In the very week Le Figaro was crying "systematic refusal," there it was: the same counter-terrorism cooperation that French ministers celebrate as soon as they take office. There are therefore two discourses: that of the newsrooms, and that of the facts.

So here is the real question, the one no one asks: why was this man out on the street that day? Because eleven years of presence, a police file, a conviction, daily surveillance and a psychiatric record were not enough for France to neutralise him — that is the reality. Laying on Algeria the moral responsibility for an attack committed by an individual Paris knew by name is a convenient transfer, designed for electoral use. "We need to establish a balance of power," the minister assured. A balance of power will never replace the question of substance: why did the French systems of monitoring, care and detention let through a man whose name everyone — except the perpetrator — knew? France mourns its dead, and it is right to do so. But it blames its neighbour rather than look at itself. That is the one truth of Mulhouse that Le Figaro does not want to see.