The French authorities have launched a major police operation to try to find the perpetrators of the murder of two prison officers, in an attack in which a detainee who was being transferred was released. About two hundred gendarmes, the special intervention group of the Gendarmerie and several helicopters participate in the device launched by the Ministry of the Interior.

“Everything possible is being done to find the perpetrators of this crime and to ensure justice is done in the name of the French people,” said French President Emmanuel Macron. The attack occurred around 11 a.m. local at a motorway tollbooth in the town of Val-de-Reuil, near the town of Evreux, an hour northwest of Paris.

Four armed men aboard two vehicles attacked the convoy of two vans transporting a detainee recently convicted of robbery and charged with homicide. One of the vehicles blocked the convoy and the four assailants began shooting with long weapons, whose firepower was far superior to the pistols carried by the agents. Two of them died in the shooting and three were injured, two extremely seriously, while the prisoner and the assailants fled in a vehicle, which was found burned out a little later in a nearby area, local media reported.

French television has broadcast images of the assault, in which it can be seen how a black vehicle takes advantage of the toll to collide head-on with the van that opened the march of the convoy. The four assailants, dressed in black and hooded, get out of the vehicle, shoot with long weapons at the prison officers and open the door for the inmate to exit. Other phone images of people who were nearby show the perpetrators brandishing long war weapons.

“We heard some firecrackers and very quickly we realized that it was a shooting, that they were real shots,” a witness explained to French public radio, detailing that there were “about twenty or thirty shots.”

The extensive search operation initially involved the closure of several roads, including the A154 motorway, and the search of all vehicles. The event shocked France, where assaults by organized gangs on armored cash transport vans were very common in the 70s and 80s, but These types of attacks had already fallen into oblivion. The plenary session of the National Assembly observed a minute of silence and began with an intervention by Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who paid tribute to the victims of the assault and said of the attackers: “We will search for them, we will find them and they will pay.”

The French Minister of the Interior, Éric Dupond-Moretti, brought together a crisis group and at the end of the meeting condemned the attack and recalled that the last violent deaths in the prison system date back to 1992. The investigation of the case has been assumed by the National Jurisdiction to Fight Organized Crime, the Paris Prosecutor’s Office announced in a statement. He added that The released prisoner is Mohamed Amra, 30, known as ‘The Fly’ and convicted of robbery last week. Amra was transferred back to the Evreux penitentiary center after being questioned by judges in the morning for an attempted murder near the city of Rouen.

Also He is accused of a voluntary manslaughter committed in 2022 near Marseille, in the framework of an investigation into drug trafficking, added the Paris Prosecutor’s Office. He added that the open case is for four charges, of which the first (homicide and attempted murder in an organized gang) already implies the possibility of life imprisonment.