“You can do a hold-up without killing. They didn’t have to kill.” Outside La Santé prison in central Paris, feelings are running high. Thirty or 40 prison officers are holding a protest over Tuesday’s murder of two colleagues at an ambush at a motorway toll in Normandy, reports BBC News.
A banner reads: “Prisons in Mourning.”
“You put a gun to the guard’s head and say ‘let him go or I shoot’. Of course the guard is going to obey. And no-one dies,” one officer says.
“Hold-ups happen. It could have been anyone of us in the van. But they didn’t have to kill,” adds another.
It is the callousness of the assault that has most upset prison officers – and the French public in general.
Gone is any semblance of a semi-mythical code of honour linked to the “good old days” of le grand banditisme. Back then, it was said, bandits never set out to take a life.
Now - it seems - they do. “There was no opening discussion. Their first words were a salvo of gunfire,” says one of the guards at La Santé.
The government has promised that every possible means will be deployed to recapture Mohamed Amra, and the gang that sprung him as he was returned to jail from a court hearing in Rouen.
How the France police van ambush and prisoner escape unfolded
But across the country talk centres on the ultra-violence that has become hallmark of the drugs underworld.
Amra was a figure in that underworld - though how important remains unclear.
Police quoted in the French press describe him as “middle-ranking” – with a string of convictions, to be sure, but mainly for lower-level crimes like aggravated robbery.
But if he was not a caïd (kingpin), how did he merit - and organise - the meticulous and ruthless escape plan, mobilising at least five vehicles, an unknown number of armed men, and bolt-holes where they could all go to ground?
At La Santé prison, they remember the man who bore the nickname La Mouche (The Fly), because he was incarcerated here in 2022.
In June that year the body of a man from Dreux was found in a burned-out car in a suburb of Marseille. The man - a known drug-dealer - had been killed in one of the city’s endless gangland tit-for-tats.
Evidently police suspected a link with La Mouche – because he was placed under judicial investigation in connection with the murder.
But if he was in La Santé prison when the murder took place, what role could he have played?
See more of this report, with video footage of the deadly attack on the prison van, from BBC News.