PARIS - 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".