On this date in 1964 — one day shy of his 30th birthday — Algerian officer Mohamed Chabani was executed as a traitor.

It’s a verdict that posterity has washed its hands of; Chabani (other transliterations include Shabani and Chaabani) was officially rehabilitated in 1984 and his name decorates public spaces in Algeria.

But in 1964, when Algeria was but two years into her post-France independence, this former FLN fighter become Algeria’s youngest colonel was governor of the fourth military district in Biskra when he fell foul of the Defence Minister Houari Boumediene.

Boumediene was in the process in this interim of consolidating power to his own circle; the following year he would overthrow President Ahmed Ben Bella and rule Algeria until his death in 1978. Boumediene allegedly feared that Chabani would form an independent bloc that could oppose him, and attempted to have the young commander assassinated.

“How long is it since you began to travel by short stages and side-tracks?” the Marquise de Merteuil demanded of Valmont in a different context. “My friend, when you want to get somewhere — post horses and the main road!”

Boumediene’s main road was to arrest Chabani for a supposed separatist plot to break away oil-rich southern Algeria and have him shot in Oran.

On this day..

• 1803: John Hatfield, Beauty of Buttermere deceiver
• 2016: Mir Quasem Ali
• 1653: Sakura Sogoro, righteous peasant
• 1806: John Docke Rouvelett, malicious prosecutor
• 1430: La Pierronne, visionary
• 2,500 days: Still hanging around
• 1944: Three Soviet infiltrators, the last in Finland
• 1924: Patrick Mahon, for the Crumbles Murder
• 1821: Timothy Bennett, duelist
• 1875: Six in Fort Smith under Hanging Judge Isaac Parker
• 1736: Both John Vernham and Joshua Harding survive a hanging
• 1918: Fanya Kaplan, Lenin's would-be assassin
• 2003: Paul Hill, anti-abortion martyr