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CRIME

French drug boss arrested in Moroccan hospital

A notorious French drug baron who skipped bail in March this year has been re-arrested in a Morocco hospital where he is being treated for a serious facial wound, security sources told AFP on Monday.

Published: 25 October 2021 18:05 CEST
Drugs, bank notes and weapons seized by French police.
Drugs, bank notes and weapons seized by French police. Illustration photo: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD / AFP.

Sofiane Hambli, a 46-year-old Franco-Algerian, used false papers to check himself into a hospital after suffering a 20-centimetre gash following an assault with a machete or sword in Tangier, the sources said.

“Once he’s recovered, we’ll go to get him,” one of the sources told AFP, confirming information first reported by the L’Obs magazine.

Originally from the eastern French town of Mulhouse, Hambli is considered one of the biggest importers of cannabis to France and has a long criminal record, as well as a history of escaping from detention.

The man known as the Chimera was named in an international search warrant this year after skipping bail last March in France, having been accused of organising the import of four tonnes of cannabis.

The Parisien newspaper reported at the time that he made €2.4 million from the transaction, but never delivered the drugs to his
buyer “who is thought to have wanted revenge”.

Hambli denied the accusations.

He is also known to have been an informant for France’s anti-narcotics police and was involved in the import of seven tonnes of cannabis in a 2015 operation that was being monitoring by authorities.

One of his associates, Moufide Bouchibi, a 41-year-old Franco-Algerian sometimes called the “king of hash,” was sentenced in France to 16 years in prison last month for drugs offences.

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CRIME

Suspects in Paris Holocaust memorial defacement fled abroad: prosecutors

French police have tracked three suspects in last week's defacement of the Paris Holocaust memorial across the border into Belgium, prosecutors said.

Published: 22 May 2024 16:32 CEST
Suspects in Paris Holocaust memorial defacement fled abroad: prosecutors

The suspects were caught on security footage as they moved through Paris before “departing for Belgium from the Bercy bus station” in southeast Paris, prosecutors said.

Investigators added that the suspects’ “reservations had been made from Bulgaria”.

An investigation was launched after the memorial was vandalised with anti-Semitic image on the anniversary of the first major round-up of French Jews under the Nazis in 1941.

On May 14, red hands were found daubed on the Wall of the Righteous at the Paris Holocaust memorial, which lists 3,900 people honoured for saving Jews during the Nazi occupation of France in World War Two.

Prosecutors are investigating damage to a protected historical building for national, ethnic, racial or religious motives.

Similar tags were found elsewhere in the Marais district of central Paris, historically a centre of French Jewish life.

The hands echoed imagery used earlier this month by students demonstrating for a ceasefire in Israel’s campaign against the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza.

Their discovery prompted a new wave of outrage over anti-Semitism.

“The Wall of the Righteous at the Shoah (Holocaust) Memorial was vandalised overnight,” Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo said in a statement, calling it an “unspeakable act”.

It was “despicable” to target the Holocaust Memorial, Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF) wrote on X, formerly Twitter, calling the act a, “hateful rallying cry against Jews”.

French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the act as one of “odious anti-Semitism”.

The vandalism “damages the memory” both of those who saved Jews in the Holocaust and the victims, he wrote on X.

“The (French) Republic, as always, will remain steadfast in the face of odious anti-Semitism,” he added.

Around 10 other spots, including schools and nurseries, around the historic Marais district home to many Jews were similarly tagged, central Paris district mayor Ariel Weil told AFP.

France has the largest Jewish population of any country outside Israel and the United States, as well as Europe’s largest Muslim community.

The country has been on high alert for anti-Semitic acts since Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel and the state’s campaign of reprisals in Gaza in the months since.

In February, a French source told AFP that Paris’s internal security service believed Russia’s FSB security service was behind an October graffiti campaign tagging stars of David on Paris buildings.

A Moldovan couple was arrested in the case.

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