the essential
A year after escaping a customs check at the Millau viaduct toll booth, two men were found last week in the Paris region. They will be tried on December 13 before the Rodez court.
This is a long-term investigation. It started almost a year ago, on November 24, 2023 exactly. That day, a Tuesday, Millau customs officers stationed themselves as usual at the exit of the Millau viaduct toll, in the South-North direction of the A75.
Two cars attract their attention: they come back from Spain, follow each other with a single driver on board and one of them is rented… The officials have a hollow nose: it is definitely a “go fast”. When they tell the drivers to stop, they accelerate and flee at full speed.
DNA “matches” in Bondy in Seine-Saint-Denis
They leave the A75, for national roads. We will only find their trace tens of kilometers further, in Lozère. Finally, an damaged vehicle will be found. There is no one on board but 43 kg of cannabis inside.
Investigations and DNA samples were quickly carried out. They “matched” several weeks later with a father born in 1982, living in the Paris suburbs. In Bondy more precisely in Seine-Saint-Denis, made famous for having seen a certain Kylian Mbappé grow up. The father of the family has never left his “city”. And he is already known for drug cases, his record shows a five-year prison sentence in the early 2000s for trafficking. The investigators wiretap him to find out a little more. We learn that he is going through a difficult time, that he sometimes wanders the streets of Paris as a homeless person after his younger brother was killed in what appears to be a settling of scores also under the backdrop of trafficking.
The police also discovered the identity of the second driver, a man who also lives in Bondy. He is not known to the courts. Both were arrested last week. They will have to answer for “go fast” before the Rodez court on December 13, at 2 p.m.
“I am threatened”
In the meantime, the father was incarcerated in the Druelle remand center. His sidekick was placed under judicial supervision. “He has nothing to do with it,” assured the first during his hearings before the judges, at the end of which he asked for time to prepare his defense. And to already provide an explanation of the facts: “Since my little brother was killed, I have been continually threatened by known and recognized guys from Seine-Saint-Denis.
Before the return trip to Spain, they wanted to attack my other brother, the only one I have left. I sent him to Algeria to protect him but, in return, I was forced to make this journey without knowing that there were drugs involved. I had no choice. It was no longer livable, they even followed my son on the football fields…”
They both face up to ten years in prison.
