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Killers of French prison guards still on the run

Three weeks after two prison guards escorting inmate Mohamed Amra were gunned down at a motorway toll station, neither he nor the gang that freed him have been traced.

La rédaction de Mediapart

This article is freely available.

Dozens of investigators scoured the crime scene in northern France. More than 450 police officers combed the countryside and the surrounding area. Interpol issued an alert. French officials said they would “spare no effort or means” to track down heavily armed assailants who ambushed a prison convoy in a brazen daytime attack, killing two guards and freeing an inmate.

But three weeks into an extensive manhunt, the suspects are still on the run, reports The New York Times.

The case has raised uncomfortable questions about whether France’s justice system fully grasped how dangerous the inmate was and if its overburdened prisons had played a role.

The authorities have been tight-lipped, declining even to specify how many people participated in the attack. But they say their investigation has made progress.

Laure Beccuau, the top Paris prosecutor, told Franceinfo radio last week that the authorities had “a number of leads that I would describe as serious.” She did not elaborate, saying only that the ambush had been well-organized, and that the suspects appeared to have planned hide-outs.

The attackers vanished in stolen cars that were later found burned. Experts say it is only a question of when, not if, they are captured.

“It always takes a bit of time,” said Christian Flaesch, the former head of the Paris police criminal investigations department. But in the end, he added, fugitives “are almost all caught.”

Violent prison breaks are rare in France. The two prison guards who died in the attack last month, at a highway tollbooth about 85 miles northwest of Paris, were the first to be killed in the line of duty in 32 years.

“This violence is quite unprecedented,” said Brendan Kemmet, a journalist and author of books about France’s most famous prison escapees, including Antonio Ferrara and Rédoine Faïd, notorious armed robbers who both staged separate jailbreaks involving helicopters, in 2003 and 2018.

Read more of this report from The New York Times.