Three men were indicted on Saturday March 7 for swindle in an organized gang, suspected of having wanted to resell nearly 40,000 expired masks in the midst of a coronavirus epidemic, said the Créteil (Val-de-Marne) prosecution.
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The three men, aged 28, 21 and 20 and taken into custody Thursday at Maisons-Alfort, were also indicted for participating in a criminal association, said the prosecution.
They are suspected of wanting to resell 40,000 protective masks that have expired since September 2012 and were bought in Marseille, said a judicial source. They intended to erase using the dissolver the end-of-use date found on each individual bag of these FFP2 type masks (with a filtering system and more waterproof).
The police had been alerted by a neighbor, intrigued by the "incessant" round trips of the suspects between their truck and the garbage bin in his building.
Since the start of the coronavirus epidemic in France, protective masks have become a rare product.
More than 8,000 masks were stolen from Parisian hospitals and 2,000 from Marseille.
