A French convicted who flew after escaping a police van in a deadly ambush was arrested in Romania, the French authorities said.
Two police officers were killed and three others injured when a vehicle carrying Mohamed Amra was attacked by men using military quality assault weapons in May 2024.
Amra, known as the fly, or the fly, has links to a large drug gang in Marseille, according to French police.
President Emmanuel Macron praised his capture as “a great success” and said that his thoughts were with the families of the deceased police.
Amra was arrested in Bucharest and had been identified through facial recognition tools and its fingerprints, said the Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau. He had changed his appearance and dyed his hair.
On Sunday, Beccuau announced the arrest of 10 people “suspected of having helped the preparation and execution of the escape and to have helped the fugitive to hide”.
Macron said he also wanted to “thank our European colleagues and our French investigators who have been chasing Mohamed Amra for months and months”.
French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau thanked Romania for his “crucial cooperation”.
Amra escaped from a prison van after the vehicle was ambushed by armed men on toll concrete around 11:00 am (9:00 am GMT) on May 14 near Rouen, Normandy.
Two prisoners were killed after the van was struck and shots were fired. Three other officers were injured.
The armed men escaped in a car that the police later found abandoned near the place where the attack occurred.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said that Amra was found guilty of burglary by a court of Evreux on May 10 and was detained in a Val-de-Reuil prison until his escape on May 14.
He had also been charged by Marseille prosecutors for an abduction that led to a death, he said.
Amra was not a “close prisoner,” said Beccuau at the time, using a mandate for very dangerous prisoners.
However, his transport would have always needed a “level three escort”, which meant that there were five police officers traveling with him.
His lawyer at the time, Hugues Vigier, said that Amra had tried to escape from the prison on the weekend before the ambush when he saw the bars of his cell, but said that he was shocked by the “inexcusable” and “crazy” violence.
“This does not correspond to the impression I had of him,” the lawyer told BFMTV.
At the time, Macron said that “everything” was underway to find the authors of the attack, who marked the first death of French prisoners in the exercise of his functions since 1992.
According to the police.
“After a human hunt for several months, Amra was arrested, finally!” Prime Minister François Bayrou wrote on X on Saturday.
