They are serial killers, torturers, sexual predators, human and drug traffickers.
All of them have the particularity of having vanished somewhere on the surface of the globe for a long time, taunting all the police launched after them.
To find and capture these criminals on the run, considered to be the most poisonous, the Europol agency is launching this morning a new part of its “
most wanted
”
campaign
. Like every year, the 22 member countries of the European Union have selected a “
headliner
”. In France, the National Fugitive Search Brigade (BNRF) has decided to put the spotlight on the so-called Joël Soudron, an atypical character to say the least in the elite of international drug traffickers.
Far from the caricature of the thug "
beautiful as a sun
" blazing on the Costa del Sol or the charismatic "
godfather
" inspiring terror, this Guadeloupe, born in September 1979, has long been a complete stranger to the police.
A real ghost not appearing in any file.
Mountain of white powder, pharaonic benefits
Atypically in the field, it was not until a case, ten years old, that Joël Soudron became a "
target
" of investigators in charge of fighting organized crime. The origins of his hunt were tied in 2011, when customs officials discovered 231 kilos of cocaine in the port of Le Havre. The “
Stups
” Office of the Central Directorate of the Judicial Police (DCPJ), which is entrusted with carrying out the investigations, directs its suspicions to the Caribbean and to a shipping company based in Guadeloupe.
Bingo!
There, in a warehouse, the agents seize 272 kilos of cocaine and 280,000 euros in cash, corresponding to a transaction.
Unrolling what a police officer called a "
long and thick investigation
" on both sides of the Atlantic, they uncover a network that was behind more than thirty shipments between 2005 and 2011. That is, in theory, a mountain of white powder and pharaonic profits for the traffickers.
The latter are identified one by one by the "Stups" who, to their surprise, find a "
brain
" unknown to the battalion.
Dozens of false identities
"
In general, the bosses who have risen to the head of the networks are known and the police have followed their rise step by step in the middle,
" we whisper to the DCPJ. Thriving under the radar screens with a discretion qualified by the bloodhounds of the BNRF as "
unusual
", Joël Soudron juggled dozens of false identities to navigate as he pleased between the French, Dutch, English-speaking Antilles as well as across the Sub-Saharan Africa where he had developed his business. The photo of this quadra with a gloomy gaze and a bald head accompanies the international arrest warrant aimed at him.
Sentenced to six years' imprisonment by default, Soudron was arrested in Mali in 2016. Extradited to France, he served his sentence and, by decision of a judge, was granted a rather surprising leave of absence on September 6, 2018. Since then, the fugitive has disappeared and remains untraceable. "
His financial strength is out of the ordinary
", assures a police officer who specifies that this criminal reconverted in the business has stakes in "
several dozen companies in French-speaking Africa
". The jackpot made available to him would allow him in particular to travel to countries that do not pay much attention to the origin of expatriates established on their soil, to afford a borrowed identity and to live in a certain comfort and under
cover.
», Even if it means changing accommodation if necessary.
The longevity of his run also depends on what a police officer calls his “
life reflexes
” adopted to guarantee the seal between his past as a “
narcocaïd
” and his new social status which allows him to rub shoulders with a whole personal and professional entourage. 'having no idea of its sulphurous trajectory.
Trajectories dissected methodically
The release of his photo as part of a large-scale call for witnesses may well bring down the mask. Last January, the “
most wanted
” of the year 2020, François Di Pasquali, 48, was captured after five years of stalking in the suburbs of Barcelona in Spain. Targeted since last fall, this former manager of an Italian restaurant convicted of the rape of an octogenarian had been located on the basis of information from the Fugitive Brigade.
Composed of experienced police officers and integrated into the Central Office for the Fight against Organized Crime (OCLCO), this unit is specialized in the tracking of escapees, convicted by default as well as all robbers, traffickers and murderers on the loose. Working on the entourage of their targets, whose trajectories are methodically dissected, these French-style marshals carry out forty or fifty arrests on average per year. In addition to Di Pasquali, they notably enabled the capture last October, on an island off the coast of Colombia, of a 34-year-old drug trafficker from Marseille, suspected of being involved in a bloody settling of scores perpetrated with an assault rifle in March. 2019 in Marseille.
More recently, they took back in Angoulême a prisoner who had taken advantage of a hospital discharge to escape to Carcassonne in early November.
Since its creation in 2006, the Brigade has already displayed a serious hunting picture in which Jean-Louis Treiber, suspected of the assassination of Géraldine Giraud and Katia Lherbier, the multirecidivist robber Redoine Faïd, escaped from the Sequedin remand center (North) or the former far left activist, Cesare Battisti.
Within the PJ, "hunters" of a particular kind have a reputation for never letting go of the prey they covet.
Joël Soudron, a new “
priority objective
”, is more than ever in the sights.
