On a calm, sunny afternoon in Algiers the terrace cafés were filled with shirt-sleeved apéritif drinkers, and families lingered in the palm-shaded parks. At the Casino de la Corniche, perched on a cliff overlooking the blue Mediterranean, teenagers danced to the rhythms of Lucky Starways and his orchestra. In a nightmare of sudden sight and sound—a shattering blast, the music stopped in midflight, the thunder of a heavy explosion —the peaceful picture was erased. It was a time bomb under the orchestra platform. In a flash the tea danqe became a scene of death and destruction. And Algiers for days afterward a city of vengeful violence and riot.
Bandleader Starways, Singer Carmen Ramos and six others were killed outright. Among the 70 injured was a 19-year-old girl who had both legs blown off. Far into the night, ambulances sped back and forth to the hospitals, their sirens wailing in the deathlike silence of the curfewed city. Coming at the end of a week of Moslem rebel terror that had already taken the lives of 16 Europeans and wounded more than 150, the outrage at the Casino de la Corniche was more than most French could stand.
To the Casbah. Hot-tempered students and war veterans ordered a general protest strike. Roaming the city in small commando units, some on motor scooters with girl friends behind, they forced shopkeepers out of stores, stopped buses and trolleys, ordering passengers to descend, poured into post offices, telling employees to quit or be beaten up. Police looked on. The riot fever reached its peak following the burial of Singer Carmen Ramos. Some 1,500 teen-agers started back to town after the ceremony, shouting "Algeria is French!"—"Death to the Assassins!" Joined by other Europeans—gangs of poor Italians and Spaniards from the working-class district of Bab el Oued and members of the locally recruited Territorial army—they surged through Algiers streets toward the Casbah. Coolly checking window stickers of parked cars, they passed over those with European names, overturned and burned cars bearing Moslem names. They smashed Moslem shops, tore up the seats and ripped down the screen in a Moslem cinema, burned open market stalls. One crowd of boys and girls invaded a butcher's shop, and with a meathook taken from it, hacked a Moslem to death in a nearby street.
Without Orders. Most Moslems went into hiding. But one Moslem truck driver, accelerating to get away, knocked down and killed a European woman. The mob dragged the driver out of his cab, beat him senseless. A soldier killed him with a long burst from his submachine gun. On the city's seafront boulevard the mob halted traffic, permitted European cars to pass, then spotted a red-capped Moslem atop a beer truck. Dragging him down, they battered him to death with beer bottles, were about to loot the truck when they discovered that the driver was French. Apologizing, they reloaded some beer cases and let him drive away.
Another truck appeared with three Moslem occupants. Two escaped to safety behind a group of French parachutists observing the scene. The third, unable to get out of the driver's cab quickly enough, was battered to death.