The organic-inorganic hybrid polymer Al(OH)(3)-polyacrylamide (Al-PAM) was investigated in flocculation of particles in 10 wt% cyanide tailing suspensions in this study. The effect of Al-PAM was evaluated with photoelectric turbidimeter, focused beam reflectance measurement (FBRM) and particle video microscope (PVM). It was found that as the amount of Al-45-PAM with maximum zeta potential and molecular weight increased, the initial settling rate of particles increased, reaching the highest 11.7 m/h, 18.5 times of the blank without flocculants. Correspondingly, the turbidity of the supernatant was 0.95 NTU, compared to 291.6 NTU in the blank, which was over 98% of turbidity removal efficiency. The cationic Al-PAM demonstrated better flocculation to the particles in the cyanide tailing suspensions than the commercial non-ionic guar gum (GG), and has potential for commercialization. The electrostatic repulsion between tailing particles was regarded as a critical parameter in determining polymer flocculation and our study indicated that both charge neutralization and bridge adsorption contributed to the particle flocculation. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.