Former French Anti-Drug Chief on Trial for Falsifying Report to Free Informant

After the validation in July by the Court of Cassation of his referral for "forgery in a public document by a person holding public authority" and "destruction of evidence", the former head of the anti-drug squad appears from September 23 to 27 before the criminal court of the Rhône, reports Sud Ouest. François Thierry faces 15 years in prison. "My client has a sense of injustice, this trial is a shame," says his lawyer Francis Szpiner, who will plead for acquittal. He will add: "The false police custody did not harm anyone and took place with the blessing of the Paris prosecutor’s office."

The former super-cop, 56, is accused of having written a false police custody report to justify the extraction from prison, in April 2012, of a major cannabis trafficker, Sofiane Hambli, recruited as an informant. Wanted in France where he was accused of having imported seven tons of cannabis at the origin of the dismissal of the former head of the anti-drug fight, the latter had been arrested in Morocco in October 2021, where he has been serving a 20-year sentence since 2022.

On October 17, 2015, customs officers had discovered seven tons of cannabis in vans parked on Boulevard Exelmans in Paris (16th arrondissement), at the foot of a building inhabited by Sofiane Hambli. This major seizure is at the origin of the triggering of a vast case touching on the methods of the Central Office for the Repression of Illicit Drug Trafficking (Ocrtis) and its responsible François Thierry. According to the investigation, the drug had arrived in France as part of a controlled delivery operation, carried out by the Ocrtis with the help of the Franco-Algerian trafficker.

The former super-cop is suspected of having favored the importation of the goods without having fully informed the judicial authority of the modalities of the operation, nor of his proximity to this informant he was managing directly.