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The black Peugeot 5008 rammed the police van carrying a prisoner as it emerged from a tollbooth in northwestern France. Hooded men with automatic weapons leaped from the car, encircling the van and firing on it with unhurried precision for more than two minutes.
When they were through, two prison guards were dead — the first to be killed in the line of duty in 32 years — three more were wounded and the still-handcuffed prisoner the van was transporting, Mohamed Amra, had escaped, setting off a vast manhunt involving several hundred officers.
“The attack this morning, which took the lives of prison guards, is a shock to us all,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said on X after the attack, which stunned the country with its brazenness and violence. “We will be uncompromising,” he added, promising to track down the perpetrators.
But more than six hours after the attack, no trace of the assailants, who also used a white Audi that followed the van, had been found and the major A13 highway between Rouen and Évreux, about 85 miles northwest of Paris, remained closed. An incinerated white car was found after the attack about a dozen miles from the scene, the Agence France-Presse news agency reported.
Mr. Amra, a mobster known as La Mouche, or the Fly, who has been implicated in international drug trafficking and organized crime, according to French news media reports, remained at large.
“It was a war operation,” Dominique Rizet, a commentator on police affairs, told the TV network BFMTV. The French authorities have not suggested that Mr. Amra has any links to terrorism.
The attack was captured on security camera footage and video filmed by bystanders that was later posted on X. At a time when France is trying hard to project an image of law and order ahead of the Olympic Games, the images of violence on the main highway from Paris to Normandy were a blow. The attack came just days after the Olympic flame arrived to much fanfare in Marseille.
Jérôme Barbier, a resident of Incarville, France, who was on his way to his beehive about 100 yards from the tollbooth, said he heard shooting, but did not see it.
“It was a big, big shooting, it lasted for five minutes,” Mr. Barbier, 58, said in a telephone interview. “Then it calmed down for one to two minutes, and then there was an explosion. And then two more gunshots.”
Mr. Barbier, who said that he had worked for the gendarmerie — the force that oversees smaller towns and rural and suburban areas in France — in the 1980s, said he could tell it was “heavy fire.”
“It wasn’t a light weapon; it was really powerful,” he said.
Prison guards are usually armed with handguns during transfers, but no armed police escort accompanied the van transporting Mr. Amra from a courthouse in Rouen to a prison in Évreux, a one-hour journey.
A court in Évreux sentenced Mr. Amra, 30, last week to 18 months in prison for burglary. His criminal record includes several thefts and at least a dozen convictions. He is also under investigation in Marseille in connection with a kidnapping and homicide case.
Hugues Vigier, Mr. Amra’s lawyer, told BFMTV that he was “completely dumbfounded” by the attack and said it did not “fit the profile” of his client.
The attack occurred on the same day that a Senate committee completed a report on rampant drug trafficking in France and recommended the creation of a French equivalent to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. It said that the government has not taken the measure “of the dimensions of the threat.”
“The extent of drug trafficking gives us the feeling that there is a relationship of strong versus weak, in which the strong are the criminal organizations and the weak is the state,” Jérôme Durain, a Socialist senator and one of the two authors of the report, told Le Monde, a French daily newspaper.
Éric Dupond-Moretti, the justice minister, said one of the guards who was killed was married with two children, and the other was married to a woman who is five months pregnant.
France’s main prison guard unions called for a symbolic shutdown of the country’s jails on Wednesday to honor their dead colleagues and to protest working conditions.
“This was an attack of an unparalleled violence, in the brutality and cowardice of the killers,” Gabriel Attal, the prime minister, told the National Assembly, which observed a minute of silence on Tuesday. “We will spare no effort or means to find them. We will track them down — and they will pay.”
Aurelien Breeden and Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting.
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