Commissioner François Thierry, 56, has been appearing before the Rhône criminal court in Lyon since Monday 23 September on charges of “falsifying public documents” and “destroying evidence”, criminal charges arising from his position as custodian of public authority. The former head of the former Central Office for the Suppression of Illicit Drug Trafficking (OCRTIS) is suspected of having organised false arrests in 2012 in favour of his informant and of having destroyed documents and telephones related to this fictitious procedural episode.
In April 2012, the head of OCRTIS obtained the green light from the magistrates for the release of Sofiane Hambli from his Nancy prison. Considered one of the biggest importers of cannabis in France, Hambli was then serving a thirteen-year prison sentence for drug trafficking. He also became a privileged informant for Commissioner Thierry, which allowed him to develop a completely new system within the Central Drugs Office, called Myrmidon, which consisted of monitoring massive imports of narcotics in order to stop major traffickers.
Hambli’s transfer is officially justified by police custody, controlled by section C2 of the Paris prosecutor’s office, a specialised interregional jurisdiction responsible for serious crimes. In parallel to this police arrest, in Nanterre, OCRTIS is piloting a controlled delivery of cannabis to Spain. Six tonnes packed in dozens of bales were unloaded from a beach in Estepona, taken to a specially rented villa and guarded by Hubert Avoine, another informant of the commissioner, registered at the central office of sources.
Avoine denounced this Spanish episode before the courts when the Hambli-Thierry affair broke out in October 2015, with the discovery in customs of seven tons of cannabis on the Boulevard Exelmans in Paris, imported from Spain, in similar circumstances. As he recounts in the book co-written with the journalist from Release Emmanuel Fansten (The infiltrator, Robert Laffont, 2017), published before his death in 2018, Hubert Avoine accuses François Thierry of having organised logistics far beyond the needs of the service. The false custody affair is being investigated in Lyon, in parallel to the main case of the Exelmans boulevard, opened in Paris and then transferred to Bordeaux.
“Guilty levity” of a magistrate
The Lyon judge established that Sofiane Hambli’s extraction was directly related to the Estepona beach operation. In short: from his hotel room, the informant posed by telephone as a sponsor to the Moroccan suppliers. The police followed the transfer of the drugs, with the aim of identifying the chain of buyers. The Justice estimates that only 1.9 tons were seized, of the 6 tons unloaded in Spain and returned to France. “big defect” in the Myrmidon system, says Judge Michel Noyer in his referral order.
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