On the morning of 5 November 1958, while a young man and woman were about to enter the Tunisian Embassy in the West German capital, Bonn, they came under fire from a speeding Mercedes. The woman escaped unharmed and disappeared from the scene, never to be located by the arriving police. Her companion, gravely injured in the attack, collapsed on the spot. He was identified as Améziane Aït Ahcène, an Egyptian lawyer who ostensibly worked for the Tunisian embassy. Améziane Aït Ahcène's true identity was in fact Algerian, and as the front pages of the major West German newspapers soon reported, he was the unaccredited representative of the Gouvernement provisoire de la République algérienne (GPRA) in Bonn. This government-in-exile had been created two months earlier by Algerian nationalists engaged, since 1 November 1954, in a brutal struggle for independence from France. With the victim identified as an allegedly senior member of the Front de libération nationale (FLN), the movement behind the GPRA, the gangster-style assassination attempt on Aït Ahcène led to extensive press speculation. Was his attempted murder related to the savage Algerian war? If that were the case – and this seemed to be the most likely explanation to most observers – then who was behind this attempt at public execution? Were the perpetrators rivals within the FLN, as the French authorities and media implied, or were they members of the Mouvement national algérien (MNA), the only remaining nationalist group challenging the FLN's claim to be the sole legitimate representative of the Algerian people? Did they perhaps belong to the group of European reactionaries, or ultras, who fought so bitterly for the preservation of l'Algérie française? Or were Arab diplomats in Bonn right to accuse the French secret services of carrying out the attack?

Whoever the perpetrators were, the assassination attempt on Améziane Aït Ahcène seemed to confirm rumours that had been circulating for months: namely, that the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had become a refuge and operational base for Algerians seeking to evade the French authorities.