A grey BMW speeds down the A31 motorway heading towards the city of Dijon in west France. Inside five men, who are suspected of being migrant smugglers, are armed with handguns.
The vehicle has been bugged by France’s anti-trafficking bureau, l’Office de lutte contre le trafic illicite de migrants (Oltim), and on the evening of Friday, February 7, 2025, investigators are listening in.
The day before, a man was wounded in a shooting at the Troyes-Le Plessis rest stop on the A5 motorway that leads west out of Paris, and there are fears of retaliation.
At 8:35pm police captain Mathieu S. gets a frantic call from a Kurdish interpreter who is listening to the conversation inside the car. Vengeance is imminent: the smugglers are determined to kill a member of a rival organisation.
The information seems particularly credible as these smugglers normally work from Thursday to Sunday and take Fridays off.
The police leap into action. Around 20 officers in 10 vehicles set off at high speed to tail the BMW, hoping to arrest the traffickers before the feud turns violent. Knowing they are dealing with dangerous targets, the police call for support from France’s elite tactical unit, RAID.
Towards 12:45am, two plainclothes RAID officers are tailing the BMW in an unmarked van when they lose sight of the vehicle. They decide to pull over into a rest stop at Villa des Tuillières, north of Dijon, when suddenly the BMW pulls in behind them.
Then, in his rearview mirror, one of the officers sees two individuals moving towards the unmarked van pointing handguns in their direction.
The officer, who is wearing a police armband, shouts “police!” and fires two shots at them through the window, leading to an exchange of fire. As bullets fly the police respond with assault rifles. They kill one individual while four more flee.
By the time reinforcements arrive, one RAID officer is on the ground, seriously wounded in the right thigh.
“I have been in the police for 11 years … I’ve experienced difficult operations, but I’ve never been so afraid I was about to die as I was that day,” the officer said during questioning one month later.
‘Major traffickers’
The day after the shooting, investigators in the Dijon gendarmerie were in a state of shock. Who were the four men willing to risk shooting at the police?
“It was clear that they intended to kill us,” said one of the targeted officers during an interview.
An autopsy of the smuggler killed by the RAID officers started to give some answers.
The body belonged to a 39-year-old Kurdish Iraqi called Karzan G., who was already known to the French police for acts of violence involving weapons.
Karzan G. had also been the subject of an investigation by the Italian police since 2023, suspected of leading a smuggling network trafficking migrants to the UK with his brother Goran G.
Their older brother Idrees G. was in pretrial detention in France linked to the sinking of a small boat in the English Channel that left seven people dead in August 2023.
Read moreOn the trail of migrant smugglers 1/3: The fall of Calais trafficker Idrees G.
“We have three bothers immersed in the world of crime,” said Xavier Delrieu, head of Oltim. “One is in prison, one had been killed, and the third, who is overseas, must still be operating.”
“We are talking about major traffickers: the organisers who control the whole market,” he added. “When the eldest brother was incarcerated, we recommended transferring him to [the high-security prison] Vendin-le-Vieil because he was still running his business behind bars.”
While Idrees G. was suspected of organising small boat crossings across the English Channel, Karzan G. was thought to have managed operations at rest stops on France’s A5 and A26 motorways.
Investigators had already identified around 10 sites between Dijon and Calais where smugglers would load migrants into the trailers of parked trucks at night. Each smuggler had a specific task: identifying the trucks heading for England, prying open trailers with crowbars or keeping watch.
They estimated that since August 2023, Kazan G.’s team had been running such operations three-to-five times a week.
“Every migrant transport operation involved between four and 28 clients, each of whom had paid €1,000 to €2,000 per person,” one investigator told a hearing in a summary seen by FRANCE 24.
At Troyes-Le Plessis rest stop, two and a half hours drive southwest of Paris, Kazan G.’s team is thought to have trafficked 122 migrants onto trucks in the six months between the end of August 2024 and early February 2025.
Wads of cash, shell companies
Investigators from Oltim had already been tracking Karzan G. for 18 months by the time the shootout with RAID took place.
Their investigation began in September 2023 when a British woman driving a motorhome was arrested in Calais for having 10 Vietnamese migrants hidden in the hold of her vehicle.
Police followed the undocumented migrants as they left the detention centre and found that they were all staying in an apartment in the Paris suburb of Ivry-Sur-Seine.
The building was placed under video surveillance and within a month the police had recorded around 60 visits by suspected undocumented migrants.
They also observed that the Iraqis used the apartment as a pickup spot from which migrants of all nationalities were taken by car to motorway rest stops.
Traditionally, people smugglers work through community networks, but the increasing difficulty of border crossings has changed the market, according to Pascal Marconville, first advocate general at the court of appeal in the northern French town of Douai, where trials against migrant traffickers are increasingly common.
“Today there are highly specialised networks for crossing the English Channel that accept all nationalities as long as they are paid," he said.
And migrant trafficking is a profitable business. According to police investigators, Karzan G. was the owner of numerous luxury cars, a bar where he lived in Cosenza, southern Italy, and shares in a shell company in the Netherlands, which suggests he was laundering money.
When police searched his home in France, they found €10,265 and $7,770 in cash stashed under a mattress.
Our series: On the trail of migrant smugglers
‘A curse in France’
It was Karzan G.’s unwillingness to share the profits of his enterprise that brought about his downfall.
Towards the end of 2024, his group experienced “a decline in business due to competition from rival networks, which infuriated him and made him want to take revenge”, investigators said.
On December 8, a man from a rival organisation was found badly injured, with broken arms and knife wounds on his body.
Then, on February 6, 2025, Karzan G.’s nephew, Khozeen S., was admitted to hospital in the Paris suburb of Kremlin-Bicêtre with two bullet wounds in his leg.
The rest stop shootout with RAID happened just 48 hours later.
In the hours that followed six individuals were arrested, taken into custody and charged with the attempted murder of a public official.
A total of eight people, including six Iraqis and two Vietnamese nationals, are currently under investigation. A ninth suspect is still at large.
Khozeen S. was in hospital when the RAID shootout happened, but when police questioned him about his role in the trafficking organisation, he said he earned between €3,000 and €6,000 per month as a migrant smuggler working for Karzan G.
Another suspect, Chawan A., denied being involved in the RAID shootout, but said he earned €150-200 per client.
The lawyer representing Karzan G. and Chawan A. declined FRANCE 24’s request for comment.
As investigators have pieced together an understanding of the events that led to the shootout in the early hours of February 8, 2025, questions remain. How many of the five passengers inside the BMW were armed? And who fired at the police officers?
A judicial inquiry into the incident, opened by the Créteil public prosecutor's office, is still ongoing. Identifying a suspect would open a pathway to bring a case for attempted murder to criminal court.
“The justice system must be extremely firm, even more so when two servants of the State have been targeted,” said Pauline Ragot, lawyer for the two RAID police officers who have, so far, filed civil suits.
Migrant trafficking is a “curse in France – like drug trafficking”, she added.
The RAID officer who was wounded in the shootout has been admitted to a rehabilitation centre and should be able to rejoin his elite unit at the end of his convalescence. For now, the father of two young children remains traumatised.
This article was adapted from the original in French by Joanna York.
English (US) · 