Hard Lines for Gang Who Raided Police

Some 600 police officers and half a dozen helicopters were still hunting last night for a gang of masked men who took the unusual step of breaking into a police station in an attempt to recover more than £40m-worth of cocaine.

In one of the country's cheekiest attempted robberies of recent years, the six heavily armed men forced their way into the gendarmerie at Les Sables d'Olonne in south-west France early yesterday morning. They overpowered the night duty officer, a 20-year-old woman, and ransacked the station looking for the drugs.

"They were clearly afraid for their lives," said Jean-Marc Loubès, the region's gendarmerie chief. "Whoever was running the operation must have put them under a lot of pressure for them to attempt such a thing. Fortunately, we'd already moved the gear."

The police had dug the 350kg of cocaine, packed into 12 holdalls, out of a nearby sand dune last Thursday, following a tipoff from someone who saw a group of men unloading bags from a beached dinghy the previous day. An abandoned yacht en route from the Caribbean was later found drifting off the coast.

A second pre-dawn robbery, this time in Paris, was more successful yesterday when a gang of some 15 masked and armed men attacked a cash strongroom in the 18th arrondissement. After blowing a 2-metre hole in the back of the building, the thieves drove off with six bags containing a total of about €6m (£3.7m).

A police patrol arrived at the scene just as the gang was fleeing, and one officer was shot in the back. He was wearing a bulletproof vest and was not seriously injured.