The man who was freed by a commando on Tuesday May 14 during a deadly operation is called Mohamed Amra. But in organized crime, it is known by other names.
The attack on the prison administration cell van that occurred on Tuesday May 14, at a toll booth in the Eure, surprised the management of the prison administration. For one main reason: the freed man, Mohamed Amra, was not considered an extremely dangerous criminal or a major figure in French banditry. “He is a man from Normandy, linked to drug trafficking, rather at the level of sponsors, but we did not imagine him at the level of such an operation,” a police source confided to 20 Minutes.
The prison administration services had noted that Mohamed Amra had tried to escape last Sunday, trying to saw the bars of his window. He was considered an individual requiring a “level 3 escort”: three prison officers were to supervise him and the team was even further reinforced, with two additional officers, including an officer.
What do we know now? That the man, born in 1994 in Rouen, was sentenced by the Evreux court on Friday, for burglary, to eighteen months in prison. He was incarcerated for these facts at the Val-de-Reuil penitentiary center. Europe 1, which obtained the documents of his “processing of criminal records”, adds that he was indicted “for 19 acts including violence and burglaries” when he was between 11 and 14 years old. All these cases were dismissed. Six other proceedings concerning him were opened by the judicial police in 2015, for suspicion of criminal associations, violence with weapons, kidnapping and attempted murder.
Still according to Europe 1, Mohamed Amra is also suspected of having ordered the murder of a drug trafficker from Dreux, found dead in Marseille in 2022. On January 5, 2022, he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment by the Rouen Court of Appeal, for “break-in, criminal conspiracy with a view to committing a crime, extortion, destruction by dangerous means, organized gang theft, aggravated break-in and violence with a weapon”. The anti-narcotics office, OFAST, even considers him a trafficker of “international scope”, a drug figure known from Marseille to the West Indies. Le Monde also indicates that the man is known to the underworld and organized crime networks under four nicknames: “Momo”, “The Fly”. But also “Yanis” and more surprisingly, “Smurf”.
Did the police underestimate his dangerousness? According to police sources relayed by Le Monde, Mohamed Amra is not “a big fish”, but “a mid-table actor in thugocracy, multi-card and opportunist”.
