Assailants targeted vehicles and a building lobby linked to prison staff in France overnight, authorities said yesterday, the latest in a series of such attacks.
Since Sunday, unknown assailants have hit several jails and facilities across France, torching vehicles, spraying the entrance of one prison with automatic fire and leaving inscriptions.
The national anti-terrorist prosecutors’ office is leading a probe into the attacks and French Minister of Justice Gerald Darmanin accused people linked to drug trafficking of being responsible.
Photo: AFP
“Clearly people are trying to destabilize the state by intimidating it,” he told the CNews/Europe 1 broadcaster yesterday morning. “They are doing it because we are taking measures against the permissiveness that has existed until now in jails.”
Darmanin and French Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau have in the past few months vowed to intensify the fight against narcotics and drug-related crime.
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.
A law against drug-related crime, which includes these prisons, is set to go to a vote in parliament at the end of this month.
Early yesterday, assailants set fire to three vehicles — including one belonging to a prison guard — in the parking lot of a jail in the southern town of Tarascon, its prosecutor said.
The vehicle 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, someone scrawled the letters “DDPF” — standing for “Rights of French Prisoners” — and tried to start a fire in the entrance of a building where a female prison guard lives, a police source said.
Before that, up until late on Tuesday, 21 vehicles had been graffitied and or set on fire, a police source said.
Most of the incidents were recorded overnight on Monday and Tuesday.
A group calling itself “DDPF” on Telegram yesterday published a video showing a prison guard leaving a vehicle, then shaky footage of a letter box, zooming in on the name on it.
The video ended with the letters “DDPF” against the backdrop of a vehicle burning in front of a building at night.
The account was created on Saturday.
In a post on Sunday, the group described itself as “a movement dedicated to denouncing violations of fundamental rights that Minister Gerald Darmanin intends to breach.”
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