The prison break: spotlight on France’s brutal drug gangs
Just before 11am last Tuesday, two prison vans slowed down to pass through a toll booth on a motorway in Normandy, said Louise Nordstrom on France 24 (Paris). They were supposed to be transporting an offender back to a secure jail in Évreux, following a court hearing in Rouen, 30 miles away. But as they pulled away, the vans were ambushed: a stolen Peugeot rammed the front of the first vehicle and an Audi blocked the convoy from the rear. Men wielding Kalashnikovs leapt out of the cars, surrounded the vans, opened fire on the guards, and released the inmate – a career criminal named Mohamed Amra. The men then sped away in the Audi, which was later found torched. Conducted with military precision, the operation took only about two minutes; but in that time two prison officers were killed and two others critically injured. A manhunt involving more than 450 police ensued. Ministers dubbed Amra, as well as the gunmen, “public enemy number one”.
Prison escapes are rare in France, said Caroline Politi in 20 Minutes (Paris) – let alone ones as violent as this. So what explains the “extreme determination” of this gang to spring Amra, asked Antoine Albertini in Le Figaro (Paris). Known as Le Mouche (The Fly), he grew up on a Rouen council estate and received his first criminal conviction aged 15. Most of his 12 other convictions were for relatively minor offences: he was in jail for robbery. But he is reported to have had ties to a powerful drug gang in Marseille. He was being investigated over a kidnap and murder there in 2022, and is also suspected of directing an attack on a French citizen in Spain in 2023.
One thing’s for sure, said Roger Cohen in The New York Times: the cold-blooded execution of the guards was consistent with the “brutality of a booming narcotics market”. France’s drug trade is worth at least $3.8bn a year; the volume of amphetamines and ecstasy seized rose by 180% in 2023. As France prepares to host the Olympics, the ambush is a reminder that what tourists see is only half the story: France’s ancient villages and historic cities conceal an increasingly “drug plagued” and violent society. As the “epicentre” of the drug trade, Marseille is an extreme example of this: 49 people were killed there last year in drug-related shootings. Organised crime has a long history in Marseille, said Joseph Downing on The Conversation. This is the city that was known as the French Connection, owing to its place on the heroin-smuggling route from Turkey to the US until the 1970s. The Corsican Mafia who ran those networks have since been replaced by a sophisticated new generation of ruthless narcobandits who supply France’s vast market for cannabis, and also trade in arms. President Macron has vowed to tackle this “scourge”, but with police budgets stretched, and complex drug cases already being neglected, it is hard to see where the resources will come from.