Mohamed Larbi Zitout

Mohamed Larbi Zitout (محمد العربي زيتوت) is a well-known Algerian activist and former diplomat.

After graduating from the Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Algiers and obtaining a master's degree in International Relations, he pursued a career in diplomacy. By 1995, he had become Algeria's Ambassador to Libya. In 1995, however - three years into the Algerian Civil War - he resigned from his position and emigrated to the United Kingdom. He claimed to have learned that the Armed Islamic Groups, whose atrocities were already becoming prominent, were in many cases being controlled by the government as part of a deliberate strategy:

From 1995 onwards, these groups were no longer merely infiltrated, but completely taken over; they became a counter-guerrilla, counter-revolutionary phenomenon. The GIA became another armed branch, theoretically Islamist but in practice doing the work of the military security, of the Algerian regime.

Muhamad Labri Zitout, antiguo viceembajador argelino en Libia, aseguró que un responsable de la seguridad le confesó: "La gran mayoría del GIA somos nosotros mismos". (Mohamed Larbi Zitout, former Algerian Deputy Ambassador to Libya, insists that a security official confessed to him: "The great majority of the GIA......

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