On the evening of October 4, 1994 a taxi driver named Amadou Diallo, forty-nine, drove two armed young people toward the Place de la Nation in eastern Paris with a shotgun at his back, and when he reached the square he deliberately ran his car into a police vehicle. It was the only thing he could do. In the shooting that began there, he and two police officers died. Twenty-five minutes after it started, three police officers, the driver and one of the two gunmen were dead or dying.
The two were Florence Rey, nineteen, a student, and her partner Audry Maupin, twenty-two, who lived together in a squat in Nanterre and moved in the autonomist and anarchist fringe of the far left. Neither had a criminal record. That evening, hooded and carrying pump-action shotguns, they climbed into the police vehicle pound at the Porte de Pantin and took the service revolvers of the two officers on guard there, meaning to use the weapons in robberies. Then things went wrong. They forced their way into a taxi, taking the driver and his passenger hostage, and ordered Diallo to drive them to the Place de la Nation.
At the square Maupin and Rey opened fire. Thierry Maymard, thirty, and Laurent Gérard, twenty-five, both police officers, were killed. Diallo was shot in the back of the neck. The two took another car and made for the Bois de Vincennes with police motorcyclists behind them. On the route de la Gravelle one officer laid his motorcycle down across the road to force the car to stop, and in the second exchange of fire Guy Jacob, thirty-seven, a motorcycle officer who approached on foot, was shot dead by Maupin. Maupin was hit by police fire and died in hospital at Kremlin-Bicêtre the next day. Six other people were wounded that night. Florence Rey was arrested at the car.
She said almost nothing, to the police, to the investigating judge, or to her own lawyers. The press made her the face of the case: a young woman from a comfortable background, photographed with close-cropped hair, taken as the emblem of a lost generation. Poems and songs were written about her. How much of her role, or of her politics, the coverage understood was another matter.
A third man was arrested two weeks after the shootings. Abdelhakim Dekhar, known as Toumi, had bought one of the two shotguns three months before, and according to the investigation had kept watch outside the pound and fled when the others took the taxi. It was Rey who eventually named him. He denied being the third man and said he had infiltrated the Paris squats to find Islamists on behalf of Algerian military security. In 1998 he was convicted of criminal association and sentenced to four years, and was freed at once, having already served them on remand. In November 2013 he was arrested for shooting a photographer's assistant at the offices of the newspaper Libération.
Rey was held on remand at Fleury-Mérogis. Her trial opened at the Paris assize court on September 17, 1998; she was defended by Henri Leclerc and Olivia Cligman. Ten witnesses gave ten different versions of the night, and the question of whether she was a murderer or an accomplice was decided by the ballistic evidence, which showed that Maupin had fired every fatal shot. On September 30 the prosecutor asked for thirty years. She apologized several times to the victims' families but, given the last word, said nothing. After five hours the jury convicted her as an accomplice, and she was sentenced to twenty years and ordered to pay 2.35 million francs in damages.
She served her sentence at the women's prison in Rennes and was released in 2009. Most accounts put the time served at about fourteen years; some French reports say fifteen, counting from her arrest. She has not spoken publicly about that night. English-language Wikipedia gives her date of birth as August 27, 1975; some other sources give August 25.
This was a single night of violence by two people, not a series of killings, and none of the four deaths was found to have been caused by her own hand.