Brian McDonald
A massive manhunt was underway in France on Wednesday against armed attackers who ambushed a convoy of prisoners, killing two prison guards, seriously injuring three other people and freeing the prisoner they were escorting. The prime minister promised the gang would be caught, saying: “They will pay.”
“We are tracking you, we will find you and punish you,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said in Parliament, to applause from lawmakers. “They will pay for what they did.”
French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said “unprecedented” efforts were being made. Hundreds of agents were mobilized in the search for the escaped convict, Mohamed Amra, and the attackers who waited for the prison van transporting him, running over it with a car before opening fire on Tuesday.
Global police body Interpol said on Wednesday that there had been issued a red warning at France’s request for the arrest of 30-year-old Amra.
Brochure via REUTERS
“A red notice has been issued at the request of French authorities for escaped prisoner Mohamed Amra, known as ‘The Fly’,” Interpol said. A red notice is a request to law enforcement authorities around the world to locate and arrest a wanted individual.
The notice said Amra is about 6 feet tall with wavy brown hair, dark brown eyes and a beard.
The violence of the attack shocked France. Prison workers held moments of silence Wednesday outside prisons in Paris and elsewhere to honor police officers who were killed.
Darmanin, speaking Wednesday on RTL radio, expressed hope that Amra could be captured “in the coming days.” Without providing full details on the extent of the manhunt, he said 450 police officers had been deployed to the area of the attack, in Normandy in northern France, to search for the attackers and obtain clues as to their whereabouts.
“The means employed are considerable,” he said. “We’re making a lot of progress.”
The attack seemed to have been carefully prepared. The convoy was transporting Amra back to prison in the Normandy city of Évreux after a hearing with an investigator in Rouen when he was ambushed on the A154 motorway.
The prison van and another prison escort vehicle had just passed a highway tollbooth when the van was struck head-on by a car. The Paris prosecutor’s office said the car was stolen and passed through the toll booth a few minutes before the prison convoy and then waited there.
Another car followed behind the convoy, apparently cornering it. The attackers jumped out of their cars and opened fire, hitting prison vehicles, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said.
The attackers and Amra fled. Two burned cars were later found that investigators are examining, Beccuau said.
One of the officers killed was a 52-year-old captain in the prison service, where he had worked for almost 30 years, and a father of two, Beccuau said. The other slain officer, 34, was a married father-to-be, she said.
Amra, 30, has a long criminal record, with at least 13 convictions for robbery and other crimes, the first when she was just 15, she said.
Escaped convict has history of violent crimes
Amra has a long history of convictions for violent crimes that began when he was just 15 years old, according to judicial sources.
The 30-year-old prisoner from Rouen in northwestern France, allegedly known as “La Mouche” (The Fly), was still at large on Wednesday, a day after alleged accomplices killed two prison guards at a toll booth and fled of the place with him.
Brochure via REUTERS
Three other prison guards were injured in the attack, one of them fighting for his life.
“He is very well known in the judiciary,” Paris chief prosecutor Laure Beccuau told reporters.
Amra has close links to organized crime, said another source close to the case who asked not to be identified, and is suspected of ordering murders linked to drug trafficking.
Another source who asked not to be named said Amra runs her own drug trafficking network.
However, none of his 13 previous convictions — for crimes ranging from armed robbery to extortion — were directly related to the narcotics business, said Beccuau, who is leading the investigation into the freeway attack.
He was arrested in January 2022 at Evreux prison, in the northwest region of Normandy, to serve several sentences, including for criminal conspiracy, extortion, robbery, armed violence and participation in an illegal motor rodeo.
The latest conviction, for robbery, was handed down just last week.
At the time of his escape, he was also facing two new charges, one for attempted murder and another for participating in a gangland killing in the southern French city of Marseille, a center of drug trafficking and gang violence.
AFP contributed to this report.
