PARIS: France’s justice minister was defiant Wednesday after assailants targeted cars and a building lobby linked to prison staff overnight, the latest such actions since the weekend.
Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin and Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau have in recent months vowed to intensify the fight against narcotics and drug-related crime.
A probe is underway into the attacks since Sunday, but Darmanin has accused people linked to drug trafficking.
“Clearly people are trying to destabilise the state by intimidating it,“ he told the CNews/Europe 1 broadcaster on Wednesday morning.
“They are doing it because we are taking measures against the permissiveness that existed until now in jails,“ he said.
Early on Wednesday, assailants set fire to three cars — including one belonging to a prison guard — in the southern town of Tarascon, its prosecutor said.
The car of another guard working at a jail outside Aix-en-Provence, also in the south, was torched outside his home, a representative from a prison worker union said.
In the Seine-et-Marne region near Paris, the letters “DDPF” — standing for “Rights of French Prisoners” — were scrawled in the entrance of a building where a woman prison guard lives, a police source said.
Before that, 21 vehicles had been graffitied and or set on fire since Sunday night, a police source said late on Tuesday.
Most of the incidents — largely torched cars but also a automatic rifle volleys fired at a prison entrance near the southern city of Toulon — were recorded overnight Monday to Tuesday.
Darmanin said he was seeking to crack down on “drug networks that continue to operate from prison cells.
“They order killings, launder money. They threaten police officers, judges, prison guards, and they escape,“ he said.
Darmanin is leading what he calls a “prison revolution” that aims to lock up 200 of France’s 700 most dangerous drug traffickers in two top-security prisons from this summer.
The plan comes after assailants last year attacked a prison van carrying suspected drugs baron Mohamed Amra at a highway tollbooth, freeing him and killing two prison guards.
He has since been re-arrested in Romania and extradited back to France.
