French police questioned well-known French rapper Koba LaD on Monday over the deadly escape from prison of a suspected drugs boss last year, prosecutors said. Koba LaD was among 24 people who were detained on Monday as part of a widening French inquiry into the shocking jail break of Mohamed Amra in May 2024.

Amra was sprung from a prison van at a motorway toll in northern France when masked gunmen armed with automatic weapons killed two prison guards and injured three others in scenes that stunned the country. After arresting the suspected gunmen and Amra, prosecutors have been trying to understand the link between them and a suspected criminal gang called the “Black Manjak Family”.

Koba LaD, who grew up in a deprived Parisian suburb and has a long criminal record, regularly features the letters “BMF” in his videos and songs. The 24-year-old, whose real name is Marcel Junior Loutarila, has around three million followers on Instagram and is still advertised to perform at the 9,000-capacity Adidas Arena in Paris next week despite being in jail.

He is awaiting trial over a deadly road accident last September, but he was removed from his cell and questioned over the Amra case on Monday, the Paris prosecutor’s office and sources told AFP. Koba LaD’s lawyer declined to comment when contacted by AFP. There have been four waves of arrests over Amra’s prison break, which served to highlight the spread of extreme violence linked to the drugs trade in France. Amra, known as “The Fly”, was arrested near a shopping centre in Bucharest in February after nine months on the run, during which the French government labelled him “public enemy number one”.

Criminal cases

Like many French rappers, Koba LaD grew up in one of the crime-infested high-rise public housing blocks on the outskirts of Paris. His first studio album “VII” was a reference to his tower on the vast Parc aux Lievres estate in Evry, south of Paris. He is well known to French security forces. In 2020, he was given a suspended prison sentence in Marseille for dangerous driving. In April 2022, he was involved in the assault and illegal detention of his former manager who claimed he was taken to a disaffected warehouse and beaten unconscious.

The same year, Koba LaD was involved in a fight in a Parisian nightclub, while in September 2024 a passenger in his car was killed when he crashed on the outskirts of Paris, allegedly under the influence of drugs. Among his most recent tracks are ones called “Freestyle BMF”, while his 2021 album “Cartel: Volume 1” made frequent references to drug-dealing in its lyrics and song titles. 

He has been spotted at Paris fashion shows, including Marine Serre’s in March last year, and was reported to be in a relationship with Parisian R&B singer Wejdene.

The modern French rap scene has been roiled by other major criminal scandals including a 2018 murder in Paris that saw rapper and former pizza delivery driver MHD sentenced to 12 years in prison. Rohff has been convicted for several firearms offenses, while rival stars Booba and Kaaris brawled at Paris’s Orly airport in front of shocked passengers in 2018. Moha La Squale, whose real name is Mohamed Bellahmed, was sentenced to three years in jail last year for abusing, threatening and sometimes forcibly confining six former partners. — AFP