Several French prisons were attacked overnight in response to government efforts to clamp down on drug trafficking, senior officials said on Tuesday, as authorities grapple with what they have called a “tsunami” of cocaine coming into the country.
Unknown assailants fired automatic weapons at the prison in the southern city of Toulon, while vehicles were burned outside other lockups across the country and staff were threatened. It was not immediately clear whether the attacks were coordinated, or who carried them out.
Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin, who has led efforts to toughen prison security and crack down on gangsters who run their empires from behind bars, said he would travel to Toulon.
“Attempts have been made to intimidate staff in several prisons, ranging from burning vehicles to firing automatic weapons,” Darmanin wrote on X. “I am going to Toulon to support the officers concerned. The French Republic is facing up to the problem of drug trafficking and is taking measures that will massively disrupt the criminal networks.”
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said he had instructed local prefects, alongside the police and gendarmerie, to immediately step up the protection of staff and prisons.
“The State’s response must be implacable,” he wrote on X. “Those who attack prisons and prison officers should be locked up in these prisons and watched over by these officers.”
French media reported that the prisons targeted included Toulon, Aix-En-Provence, Marseille, Valence, and Nimes in southern France and Villepinte and Nanterre, near Paris.
Years of record South American cocaine imports to Europe have supercharged local drug markets, sparking a wave of drug violence across the continent.
France has not been spared, with record cocaine seizures, and gangs reaping windfalls from the white powder as they expand from traditional power bases in cities like Marseille into smaller regional towns unaccustomed to drug violence.
The rise in gang crime has lifted support for the far-right National Rally party, and helped drag French politics rightward. Darmanin, a former interior minister, and Retailleau have prioritized tackling drug trafficking.
In February – as he announced record cocaine seizures of 47 tonnes in the first 11 months of 2024, versus 23 tonnes in all of 2023 – Retailleau said France had been hit by a “white tsunami” that had rewritten the rules of the criminal landscape.
Darmanin has proposed a series of measures to tighten prison security, including isolating the country’s top 100 kingpins.
Lawmakers are also close to approving a sweeping new anti-drug trafficking law that would create a new national organized crime prosecutors’ office and give greater investigative power to police probing narcos.
French authorities scored a win against drug crime in February, when they recaptured Mohamed Amra, a French fugitive known as “The Fly.” His escape as he was being transported from prison to a court hearing resulted in the deaths of two prison guards and was seized upon by right-wing politicians as evidence that France had lost its grip on drug crime.