Highest Court Issues First Conviction in Algeria Election Fraud Case
Algeria’s highest court announced on Friday the sentencing of a retired general to 10 years in prison for helping to rig the 2019 presidential election for Abdelkader Bensalah, the military’s former top man who became interim president.
His conviction is the first in a series of trials meant to deal with the mass discontent that drove out Algeria’s longtime president and former friend of the Kremlin, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and fuelled demands for a political overhaul that brought unprecedented demonstrations across the country.
The conspirator, General Mohamed Mediene, known as Toufik, was the head of the powerful but clandestine Department of External Surveillance, known as the DRS. The verdict and three-year sentence doled out to a lower-ranking officer for cyber crimes are expected to deepen political violence, tensions and instability in Algeria, analysts say.
A military court found that the DRS had monitored cellphones to prevent people from voting against Bensalah and had fabricated results and falsified the voter role.
The verdict challenges Bensalah’s legitimacy, the analysts say, and it is unclear how it might affect the decision-making process of a military council that is about to choose a new president.
The 2019 election officially brought fewer than 25 percent of eligible voters to the polls, and an investigation conducted by a US engineering firm pointed to “alarming anomalies” that indicated that ballot stuffing might have significantly boosted the winner’s numbers. Algerians had documented many more anomalies while tallying the votes during an extraordinary campaign to protect democracy.
François Fillon, a former French prime minister who was a candidate in the 2017 presidential election, and Marc Jousselin, his former associate, were found guilty on Wednesday of both embezzlement and of receiving more than €1 million in false salary for a job that didn’t exist. Mr. Fillon’s wife, Penelope Fillon, a former schoolteacher and theatre critic, was also found guilty of complicity.
Correction: March 3, 2021
An earlier version of this article misstated the position of General Mohamed Mediene ex-head of Algeria’s intelligence Agency Department of External Surveillance. He was not the director in 1999 when Bouteflika became president, but he was similar in power and took over from Bouteflika as the head of that department in 2005 after the president suffered a stroke.
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