Europe

Huge manhunt launched in France after gunmen kill two guards and free inmate from prison van

Prisoner escape comes amid rising drug-linked crime across Europe

A forensic investigator works at the scene of the ramming attack that took place at a road toll in Incarville, northern France on Tuesday morning. Photograph: Alain Jocard/AFP via Getty Images

Tue May 14 2024 - 19:21

Gunmen wearing balaclavas ambushed a prison van in northern France on Tuesday to free a drug dealer, killing two prison guards, severely wounding three and triggering a big police manhunt.

The brazen, planned attack underlines the growing threat of drug crime across Europe, the world’s main cocaine market. It took place at about 9am local time at a toll booth in Incarville in the Eure region of northern France.

It came on the same day that France’s Senate released a major report on drug trafficking, warning that the country faces a “tipping point” from rising narco violence that represents “a threat to the fundamental interests of the nation”.

The fugitive inmate, named Mohamed Amra, known as The Fly, is a 30-year-old drug dealer from northern France, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office and police sources. He had been convicted of burglary by a court in Evreux on May 10th and was being held at the Val de Reuil prison.

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Amra had also been charged by prosecutors in Marseille for a kidnapping that led to a death, the Paris prosecutor’s office said. A police source in Marseille said Amra was a drug dealer with ties to the city’s powerful “Blacks” gang.

Images on social media showed at least two men in balaclavas carrying rifles circling near an SUV that was in flames. The SUV appeared to have been rammed into the front of the prison van.

Amra’s lawyer, Hugues Vigier, told BFM TV that the violence of the incident did not correspond with the person he knew. He said Amra had tried to escape from prison on Sunday by sawing at the bars of his cell.

“This element suggests that there was an escape attempt in preparation,” Mr Vigier said.

French president Emmanuel Macron said the fatal attack “is a shock for us all” and that “everything is being done to find the perpetrators of this crime so that justice can be done in the name of the French people. We will be implacable.”

Interior minister Gérald Darmanin said a big manhunt had been launched.

“All means are being used to find these criminals. On my instructions, several hundred police officers and gendarmes were mobilised,” he wrote on X.

Justice minister Éric Dupond-Moretti said the prison van was attacked while Amra was being driven to meet an investigating judge in Rouen. He said two of the injured officers were in critical condition.

“Absolutely everything will be done to find the perpetrators of this despicable crime,” he told BFM TV. “These are people for whom life means nothing. They will be arrested, judged and punished according to the crime they committed.”

The senate report said there had been a five-fold increase in French cocaine seizures over the last decade, and France’s drug trade had annual turnover of €3.5 billion.

With the country at “a tipping point”, it recommended the creation of a French version of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, and a renewed focus on intelligence, money laundering and corruption.

Marseille has been the epicentre of France’s gang violence, with a particularly violent war between trafficking gangs.

France’s main prison guards unions called for a symbolic one-day shut down of the country’s jails “to express our emotion in support of our colleagues who died in service.” They also sought an emergency meeting with the justice minister to discuss prison overcrowding and security risks. – Reuters

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