Henri Curiel

Born

1914-09-13

Died

1978-05-04

Birthplace

Cairo, Egypt

Biography

Henri Curiel, born September 13, 1914 in Cairo (Egypt) and murdered on May 4, 1978 in Paris, is a communist and anti-colonialist activist. Henri Curiel is the father of the journalist Alain Gresh and the cousin of the spy and double agent George Blake, who declared in 1991 to have been strongly influenced by his Egyptian communist cousin. Born in Cairo at the beginning of the last century into a wealthy Jewish family of Italian origin, Curiel grew up in a Francophile family environment keen on French culture. Destined to take over from his banker father, it is thanks to the woman who will become his wife that he discovers the harsh reality of the economic and social situation of the peasants who work on his family's land, in the Nile Delta: a shock, which, according to his comrade Joseph Hazan, led him to political involvement. Founder in 1943 of one of the tendencies of the Egyptian Communist Party, support of the anti-fascists and the resistance against the arrival of the Nazis in Egypt, he approved the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. Finally expelled from Egypt in 1950 by King Farouk and stripped of his Egyptian nationality, he went into exile in France. His relations with the PCF were difficult, especially when, in the middle of the Algerian war, the French Communist Party voted full powers to Guy Mollet to intensify the repression against the FLN and the Algerian population. After a stint in French prisons due to his active support for the Jeanson network, he created, after 1962, an international support network serving national liberation movements in the Third World but also in Europe where anti-fascists are fighting (Greece , Spain, Portugal). This clandestine organization lasted 15 years. A man of dialogue, ardent internationalist, opposed to terrorism, his action for peace in the Middle East and his support for ANC activists undoubtedly motivated his assassination. During 1976, the journalist Georges Suffert, in the magazine Le Point, was at the origin of a press campaign launched against him. The article accuses him of being the leader of an international terrorism support network run by the KGB. The Minister of the Interior, Christian Bonnet, placed Henri Curiel under house arrest in Digne on October 25, 1977, but this measure as well as the expulsion order against him were lifted on January 12, 1978. On May 4, 1978, a commando of two men enter the courtyard of the building in which he resides, 4, rue Rollin in Paris. At 2 p.m., Henri Curiel comes down to go to his yoga class. He was shot dead at the foot of his elevator with four bullets from a Colt 45 pistol (Colt 1911). Defense secrecy always stands in the way of the truth of what has all the attributes of state crime.