“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.
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.
(...)
With European elections approaching, Tuesday’s drama is grist to the mill for the far-right, already riding high in the polls. Marine Le Pen's National Rally’s call for tougher policing and tougher penalties clearly strikes a chord.
At La Santé many of the prison staff are black – originally from Africa or the Caribbean.
“We were all brought up in a world of the political left,” says one, named Geoff. “But we are moving to the right. I can’t speak for the others, but I will be voting for the (far-right) National Rally.”
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