National Police agents arrested Walid Bara, alias Fondu, alleged leader of the DZ Mafia, the Marseille-based organization that controls drug trafficking in southern France and which in recent months has become one of the main security concerns for Emmanuel Macron’s government, in downtown Madrid on Tuesday night. Bara, 40, lived in the capital “isolated,” without interacting with anyone and using numerous security measures to avoid being located, according to details provided by the Ministry of the Interior on Wednesday in a statement. “Not even the neighbors of the apartment where he lived knew him, and he went out on the street as little as possible, to buy food,” add sources close to the investigation consulted by EL PAÍS. When he was captured near the rental home he occupied in Plaza de la Cruz Verde, in Madrid de los Austrias, Fondu was carrying false French documentation and was unarmed.
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The leader had been wanted since May 2024, when he fled after being released from prison despite being charged in four cases, three of them for murders. His release was due to a series of errors and procedural failures. The DZ Mafia leader now arrested had since then four European arrest warrants (EAW) issued by France for different crimes and was arrested just hours after a French court sentenced him in absentia to 25 years in prison for his involvement, along with other members of the organization, in a double murder committed in a Marseille hotel in 2019, during a war for control of drug trafficking.
When he was arrested, Bara admitted to the agents that he knew the sentence just imposed by a French court. “He made a slight attempt to flee, but seeing himself surrounded by a large police operation, he did not resist,” said an officer who participated in his arrest. The criminal, classified as “very dangerous,” also asked the police how they had managed to find him. Fondu had avoided any contact with his family and friends in the last two years precisely to prevent his whereabouts from being discovered.
The Police believe Bara settled in Spain shortly after fleeing two years ago ―“he already spoke Spanish with some fluency”― but it was not until three weeks ago that investigations allowed placing him in Madrid. Until then, he had been sought in other places, mainly on the Mediterranean coast, but without success. “We do not rule out that he moved to other places, but if he did, he knew how to hide his trail,” police sources say. During all this time he has used various false identities, which, combined with his ability not to relate to anyone, has made his location “a complex investigation” in which agents from the French Police Nationale and the ENFAST network (European Network of Fugitive Active Search Teams) collaborated and traveled to Spain.
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When the murder for which he has been convicted occurred, the gang was not yet structured as such nor did it receive the name by which it is currently known. Later, precisely through contact in prison among its members, the organization began to take shape. The DZ Mafia was born in 2023 in the La Paternelle neighborhood, north of Marseille. A cité, one of those urban residential areas with immense concrete towers built after Algeria’s independence to house hundreds of thousands of pieds noirs (emigrants who fled the North African country in the early 60s due to the war of independence) and now turned into strongholds where gangs take cover.
This area, located at the exit of the A7 highway, has immense strategic and logistical value and was the scene of a bloody war between the then dominant clan ―the Yoda― and the newly born DZ Mafia (the initials refer to the word Algeria in Arabic and Berber languages, Dzayer). The result was the disappearance of the former and a certain pacification. Also the rise of figures like Karima Harrat, instigator of the murder of Farid Tir, a drug trafficker, and Mohamed Bendjaghlouli, a friend of his in a room of the Formule 1 hotel, the crime for which Bara has just been convicted.
Today the DZ Mafia is a horizontal organization, more similar to Mexican cartels than traditional Italian mafias. They operate based on social networks and instant messaging applications like Telegram, Snapchat, or Signal. “They operate like a McDonald’s, like franchises,” French police sources explain to this newspaper. The DZ Mafia provides the name, the image, the drugs…, but there is a certain independence for each to act. Also, their leaders manage it remotely, from another country or from prison, as has happened with several of those convicted in the recently held trial.
