Paris cannabis case: Bordeaux prosecution appeals Sophiane Hambli's sentence, detainee in Morocco
The Bordeaux public prosecutor's office has appealed the 20-year prison sentence handed down to Sophiane Hambli in the case of 7 tonnes of cannabis in Paris in 2015.
Bordeaux prosecution contests Hambli's sentence in 7-tonne cannabis case
The Bordeaux public prosecutor's office has appealed the 20-year prison sentence handed down against Sophiane Hambli, a detainee in Morocco, in the case of the transport of seven tonnes of cannabis through central Paris in 2015, reports h24info.ma.
Hambli, 50 years old, tried in absentia, had been sentenced to this term accompanied by a security period of two-thirds, in accordance with the prosecution's submissions. The public prosecutor's office also appealed the sentences concerning five other defendants, and joined the appeals lodged by six additional convicted persons.
François Thierry will not appeal
Conversely, former director of the Central Office for Combating Illicit Drug Trafficking (Ocrtis), François Thierry, condemned in March to one year in prison with a suspended sentence for complicity in drug smuggling, has not contested his conviction. The Bordeaux public prosecutor's office confirmed to the AFP that the commissioner had "not appealed his conviction within the 10-day deadline prescribed", confirming information from the newspaper Libération. His conviction is now final.
His lawyer, Me Francis Szpiner, had nevertheless denounced an "unjust conviction" of his client at the end of the trial, who currently heads the Police Transformation Service of the national police.
The "Myrmidon" strategy at the heart of the debate
The Bordeaux criminal court had found François Thierry guilty at the end of March of having "provided assistance to trafficking" for the benefit of Sophiane Hambli, his principal informant. The prosecution had nevertheless requested his acquittal.
At the hearing, the former Ocrtis director — since renamed Ofast — had defended the so-called "Myrmidon" strategy, implemented between 2010 and 2016: infiltrate trafficking networks via informants, by accepting drug shipments onto the territory, in order to apprehend the network leaders.
It was within this framework that he had organised a fake detention of Sophiane Hambli in 2012. He was acquitted of these facts in 2024 in Lyon. In 2015, another operation linked to this strategy had led customs, in a context of rivalry between services, to discover the seven tonnes of cannabis on Boulevard Exelmans, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris — a delivery supposedly to be "monitored" by the police. François Thierry himself had described the episode as an "operational disaster", whilst insisting that he had never "wanted to conceal anything".
An affair with lasting institutional consequences
This high-profile case directly led to a reform of anti-drug efforts in France. Besides Hambli and Thierry, some fifteen other defendants were condemned at the Bordeaux trial, to sentences of up to eight years in prison.
Source: Google News MA