French President Jacques Chirac met his Algerian counterpart Abdelaziz Bouteflika on Monday to discuss ties between their countries which have been getting noticeably deeper recently in the face of resentment.
Bouteflika was seen flying in by helicopter to Chirac's official vacation retreat of Bregancon, a fenced-off stone fort on a peninsula jutting out into the Mediterranean Sea in southern France.
The two leaders were to lunch together as they talked about ways of "reinforcing ties between France and Algeria", Chirac's office in Paris said.
The meeting came one day after Bouteflika and 13 other heads of state of African countries attended a ceremony hosted by Chirac on board the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle in which tribute was paid to the thousands of soldiers from France's former colonies who took part in a World War II invasion of the French Riviera.
The assault, carried out on August 15, 1944, was a follow-up to the much bigger D-Day invasion that had been launched 10 weeks earlier.
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