Hundreds of police in France searched Wednesday for an escaped inmate and the armed assailants who freed him during a violent ambush on a prison convoy a day earlier, an attack that left two guards dead, deeply shocked the nation and sparked protests by prison guards. of all country.
“We are investing considerable resources in this,” Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior minister, told RTL radio the morning after the ambush, which a small group of assailants staged at a tollbooth on a major highway about 85 miles northwest. from Paris.
More than 450 officers, he said, have searched the area of the country where the attackers used two cars to block the prison convoy before emerging with automatic weapons and shooting repeatedly, killing two guards and wounding three others before fleeing with the released inmate.
Darmanin said it was unclear how many attackers had taken part in the ambush, although security camera footage and bystander videos that spread on social media after the attack suggested there were at least five. He did not say whether investigators had identified them.
Darmanin said the risk of the attack and the amount of preparation he appeared to have gone into planning it were surprising, given that the inmate who was released, Mohamed Amra, 30, was not high-profile, despite having a long criminal record. .
“The violence, the massacre, the disproportionate means used to free this person,” Darmanin said, did not match what authorities knew about Amra, whom the Interior Minister described as “not the biggest criminal we have in our country.” country”. prisons.”
Amra was not in a maximum security prison and prison authorities had not requested a police escort during her roughly hour-long transfer Tuesday between a court in Rouen and a prison in Évreux.
He has been convicted 13 times for crimes including extortion and assault, as well as several robberies, according to Paris’ top prosecutor. His most recent conviction was for robbery and he has not been convicted of any drug-related charges.
But Darmanin said Amra was also under investigation in Marseille, southern France, in connection with a drug-related kidnapping and homicide case, noting that traffickers sometimes subcontracted jobs to people who were not directly part of the drug traffic. .
As the ambush and subsequent manhunt attracted international attention, French prison guard unions expressed shock and outrage at the attack, which they said reflected dangerous working conditions fueled by an unsustainable level of violence in overcrowded prisons.
As of last month, there were almost 77,500 inmates in France, but there was room for fewer than 62,000, according to official statistics. And France’s official prison watchdog has described a worsening “climate of violence” in the country’s prisons in recent years.
Erwan Saoudi, a representative of the Force Ouvrière Justice union, told France 2 television on Wednesday that at the prison where he works in Paris, inmate occupancy was at 170 percent of its capacity, with a staff complement of only 80 percent. percent of normal levels.
“The balance of power is broken,” Saoudi said, adding: “We have been sounding the alarm for years about this increasing level of violence.”
Transporting inmates out of prisons used to be primarily a police responsibility in France, but it gradually came into the hands of prison guards over the past decade and is still a relatively new task for them, Saoudi said. Prison guards say their equipment — guns and pickup trucks — does little to deter attackers with powerful cars and heavy weapons.
On Wednesday morning, hundreds of guards symbolically blocked prisons across France and observed a moment of silence. They demanded greater security during prisoner transfers and a reduction in outside prisoner transportation; for example, having legal officials come to prisons for certain procedures, or using video conferencing where possible.