CCTV footage widely circulated on social media reveals the violence unleashed at the Incarville tollbooth on the A154 freeway, 30 kilometers southeast of Rouen in northwestern France. The incident occurred during a prisoner's escape, which claimed the lives of two Caen prison officers, on Tuesday, May 14, at around 11:10 am. During the attack, three other civil servants were seriously injured, one of whom remained in life-threatening condition as of Tuesday evening. They were all tasked with escorting the prisoner, who was being transferred from Evreux prison to Caen court.

The clip shows a white prison cell van being hit head-on by a black Peugeot as it passes through the tollbooth. A car, also belonging to the prison administration, follows and gets stuck. Almost immediately, two men jump out of the ram car, while two others burst into the back of the car behind. All are dressed in black, wearing balaclavas and carrying automatic weapons. Inside the van was Mohamed Amra, alias "Momo," "La Mouche," "Yanis" or "Schtroumpf," a drug trafficker born on March 10, 1994, in Rouen. He is "very unfavorably known to the police and judicial authorities," and his profile raises questions.

According to various police and judicial sources interviewed by Le Monde, Amra is not "a big fish," but rather a "middle-of-the-road, freelance, opportunistic" player. As confirmed at a press conference on Tuesday evening by Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau, his most recent sentence, of 18 months' imprisonment, was handed down on May 7 by the Evreux criminal court in a case of aggravated theft. Before that, on April 14, 2020, the same court had sentenced him to three months' imprisonment for motorized rodeos.

Less than two years later, on January 5, 2022, he was also sentenced to three years' imprisonment handed down by the Rouen Court of Appeal, for "burglary, criminal conspiracy to commit a crime, extortion, destruction by dangerous means, organized theft, aggravated burglary and violence with a weapon."

Extreme determination

Even this last sentence was not enough to place him among the figures at the "top end of the spectrum," whether drug barons or major criminals. However, Amra's intermediate position in the criminal hierarchy does not explain the extreme determination and degree of preparation of the commando that enabled his escape, an action that only particularly seasoned gangsters are capable of organizing and carrying out.

An investigation conducted by Marseille's specialized inter-regional court reveals a far more dangerous picture. Amra has been under investigation since June 2022 for "complicity in organized kidnapping, complicity in organized murder" and other related offenses, following the discovery on June 17, 2022, of the charred body of a man born in Dreux (northwestern France) in 1990, in the trunk of a Kangoo vehicle in the commune of Le Rove (southern France), near Marseille. Identified thanks to his DNA, the victim was known for drug trafficking, an activity which had led him to be in the Marseille region when he was abducted and murdered.

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