Who is Mohamed ‘the Fly’ Amra? France’s most wanted criminal

He is known by many names: the Fly, Momo, Yanis or Schtroumpf, the French word for Smurf.

His nicknames do not sound particularly menacing, but Mohamed Amra was involved in one of the most violent prison breaks in recent French history. Two prison officers were killed and two others were left in a critical condition in the ambush that freed him and turned him into France’s most wanted man.

“I cracked up, I cried. I wasn’t well,” his mother told RTL radio, which did not disclose her name. “How can you take people’s lives like that? It’s serious.” She said she had had little contact with her son in recent months outside the occasional visit to him in jail. “He doesn’t talk to me, he’s my son [but] he doesn’t say anything to me.”

Amra, 30, grew up on the Sandpit council estate in Rouen and earned his first criminal conviction at the age of 15. He has since acquired 12 other convictions, according to Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor. In 2020 he was given three months in jail for illegal motorcycle racing and in 2022 he was sentenced to three years for armed robbery and belonging to a criminal gang.

On May 7 he received a further 18-month sentence for breaking into supermarkets and restaurants in 2019, when he took about 200 bottles of alcoholic drinks and €7,500 in cash.

However, police sources say he is suspected of far more serious crimes, suggesting that he had moved up the French underworld. The ambush took place when he was returning to his jail in Évreux from Rouen, about 30 miles away, where he had been questioned by an investigating magistrate over his alleged role in the death of a man shot in the head and left in a car that was set alight near Marseilles in 2022.

The partner of the victim, who was from Dreux, west of Paris, said she was sent photos of him after he had been kidnapped and before his death. The photographs were accompanied by a ransom demand. Police believe the death was linked to the Marseilles drugs trade.

In 2022, according to the prosecutor, Amra was also arrested on suspicion of involvement in an attempted murder in Saint-Étienne-de-Rouvray near Rouen the previous year.

Police sources said that Amra was accused of involvement in a shooting on the Costa del Sol in Spain last summer. Although he was in jail at the time, he is suspected of having helped to organise the attempted murder of a French man from Évreux , who escaped unhurt. In what is thought to have been a revenge attack, two men were shot dead in Évreux a week later. French media outlets said one of the men was close to Amra.

Beccuau said that Amra had not been convicted of drugs-related offences. A prison source said he was due to face a disciplinary hearing on Wednesday after officers noticed that the bars of his cell window had been covered in sticky tape. When they removed the tape they found that the bars had been partly sawn through.

Maître Hugues Vigier, Amra’s lawyer, said he was “completely stunned”. He added: “I have trouble imagining that this boy could be involved in blind, dramatic, inexcusable violence. That does not correspond to the profile I had perceived.”

The lawyer suggested that Amra might be the victim of a gang that wanted to take revenge on him and “make him pay for what they suppose he has done”.