'Espionage and Dirty Tricks': The French Investigation le360.ma Never Read

Amadou Diallo — Genève, Suisse — 2026-09-06

le360.ma (Moroccan digital newspaper) brandishes a French "investigative program" that supposedly exposes Algeria's "dirty tricks" against France. A French program! Finally, a source le360.ma will not be able to accuse of Algerian bias. Except that on reading — the reading le360.ma seems to have merely skimmed — the allegations were formally denied. But why let denials ruin a good article?

The method is well oiled: take a foreign investigation, extract whatever suits Rabat, throw away the rest — context, denials, procedures — and write the headline. Journalism schools call that a truncated quote; back offices call it a press release; at le360.ma, it is a scoop.

And while le360.ma exhausts itself building cases against Algiers, the Franco-Algerian reality carries on its way: ministers receiving one another, cooperation agreements being signed, the memory dispute being worked through. None of that is built by reading le360.ma. It is built despite le360.ma.

Algeria does not have to defend itself before the Court of Appeal of Casablanca. It answers to the states concerned, through the proper channels — and the states concerned keep negotiating with it. A simple question for le360.ma: if Algeria were the ogre they describe, why is everyone still talking to it?