French helicopter jailbreak gangster arrested by police
Creil ( France), Oct. 3: French police arrested Wednesday a notorious gangster who had been on the run for three months after an audacious Hollywood- style helicopter jailbreak.
Dozens of masked police swarmed a public housing estate in the Oise region north of Paris in the early hours, nabbing 46- year- old Redoine Faid along with four other people in a raid on an apartment.
Faid’s brother Rachid and two of the gangster’s nephews were arrested along with the apartment’s landlady, according to police sources.
Two guns were found in the flat, while two other alleged accomplices were arrested during a simultaneous raid in the Paris region, sources said.
At around 3 am, “I heard a racket,” said Alliou Diallo, who lives on the ground floor of the small building, three floors below the apartment where Faid was holed up.
“I saw around a hundred police wearing masks,” he said, adding of Faid: “I never thought he could be here.”
Prime Minister Edouard Philippe hailed the “meticulous” police work that led to the arrests, saying in a tweet that they had pulled off the high- stakes operation “without any clashes”.
But another local resident, Farah Ziane, was less happy — the police initially stormed her grandfather’s apartment by mistake.
“They broke down my 86- year- old grandad’s door, it’s shameful,” she said.