Less than twenty days after the conclusion of the Bizerte crisis and basking in patriotic fervour of the Tunisian people, Bourghiba judged that the moment had come to remove his principal political rival. Once Ben Youssef arrived in Frankfurt, he left his wife Soufia in a café on the Kaiserstrasse and went towards the Hotel Royal, situated on the same street. It was there that the two henchmen met him and brought him with them to their room to go over the plan for the coup d'état. One of them shot him at close range around 16:30. It was only three hours later that Soufia discovered her husband bathing comatose in his blood. He was taken to the University Hospital Frankfurt where he died around 22:45 without ever regaining consciousness