The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks

by Paul Simpson

  The Durant Daily Democrat, 22 May 1978: “Alabama officers seek 2 Oklahoma fugitives”

  The Durant Daily Democrat, 23 May 1978: “Elderly woman killed in Alabama by fugitives”

  The Durant Daily Democrat, 24 May 1978: “Alabama officers find Dennis, Lancaster crafty fugitives”

  The Durant Daily Democrat, 25 May 1978: “Hunt for fugitives shifts back to Texoma area”

  The Durant Daily Democrat, 26 May 1978: “3 Troopers, convicts die in gunbattle”

  The Durant Daily Democrat, 28 May 1978: “Past meeting saved life of Washington, Busby”

  The Durant Daily Democrat, 28 May 1978: “Teen credited for saving children”

  The Durant Daily Democrat, 28 May 1978: “It cost them their lives”

  The Durant Daily Democrat, 31 May 1978: “Trooper-Pilot sees fugitives’ final minutes”

  The Durant Daily Democrat, 8 June 1978: “Missing rancher is feared victim of Dennis, Lancaster”

  The Meridian (Mississippi) Star, 29 May 1978: “An Odyssey of Frustration”

  The Tulsa World, 27 May 1978: “33-Day reign of terror ends in Caddo gunfight”

  The Victoria Advocate, 27 May 1978: “Five Killed in Shootout”

  OHPTrooper.com: “OHP’s Darkest Day: Remembering Caddo”

  Real Prison Breaks, Cineflix Productions, 2011

  Containing the Taliban

  Some of the largest escapes in the first twelve years of the twenty-first century have come as a result of the conflicts that followed the bombing of the World Trade Center in 2001, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iran against the Taliban. On a number of occasions dozens of Taliban members have been freed – or come very close to freeing themselves – from the prisons and US Army camps around the area in which they are being held. During the latter half of 2012, as this book was being compiled, there were three incidents in which large enough numbers escaped that they were deemed worth reporting by the world’s news agencies – but, as more than one pointed out, escapes are so common that they are not deemed newsworthy simply because they happened.

  One of the first attempts came from the US Army Camp Bucca in Iraq in March 2005. Between the start of the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the discovery of a huge tunnel shortly before at least 200 detainees made their escape on 24 March 2005, over 40,000 people were arrested by the US military. Over 10,000 were still being held at the three main prisons – Bucca, Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper – at the end of that period. Many should never have been there in the first place: the commander of Bucca, Colonel Austin Schmidt, guessed that around a quarter of the prisoners had been swept up during raids, or had been victims of personal grudges.

  Bucca, named after one of the fire marshals who died in the 9/11 attacks, operated between 2003 and 2009. Built near the border with Kuwait, it had a two-mile perimeter fence surrounding twelve compounds where the prisoners lived in canvas tents or air-conditioned plywood buildings, guarded by soldiers bearing automatic rifles, watching from three-storey wooden towers. There were teething problems: in January 2004, one detainee was able to escape through the wire, and the official report blamed inexperience, complacency, poor leadership and lack of communications. Five days after that, seven more escaped during the night, of whom five were recaptured; a fortnight later, several were able to crawl under the fence during a very heavy fog – visibility was down to ten to fifteen metres.

  In January 2005, a riot broke out, which led to the deaths of four detainees. Around the same time, work on a tunnel started. It began underneath the wooden floorboards of one of the tents: the prisoners dug down three feet through the sand, put in a false bottom with plans, and then tunnelled down a further twelve feet where the sand was replaced by packed dirt. After the entrance was reinforced with pieces of plywood and sandbags, the tunnelling began in earnest, with over 200 inmates involved at some point.

  The work could only be carried out at night, with teams of ten men operating between 1 a.m. and the dawn call to prayer, which preceded the daily headcount. With air provided by homemade bellows, the diggers, who used flattened tent poles wrapped with canvas grips, were only able to move forward three feet a day. Each would stay at the dirtface for five minutes at a time, filling up five-gallon water jugs and passing them back to be redistributed around the camp. Sacks from their bread rations were filled, and then spread across a soccer field.

  It was that which alerted the Americans initially. Although it was invisible to the naked eye, satellite imagery showed that the field was changing colour because of the different dirt that was being tramped into it. Additionally, there were complaints of showers being clogged up, and two dozen portable toilets ceasing to function. Some guards even complained that the floor in some of the tents seemed to be rising.

  By the end of March the tunnel was complete. It was 357 feet long, and the width of a man for the majority of its length, with around a hundred tons of soil moved in about eight weeks. It was illuminated with homemade torches built from radio diodes, and the walls were as smooth and strong as concrete, after being sculpted with water and milk. The plan was for groups of twenty-five men to go through at a time starting after midnight on 24 March.

  Although the Americans were aware that something was wrong, they couldn’t work out what. Informants within the camp weren’t able to tell them anything other than yet another tunnel was being built – three others had been detected at very early stages during the first part of the year. However, when the tunnel was finished, one of the informants said that it began in Compound 5; his reason for betraying his friends was apparently that he feared there would be a bloodbath if the Americans caught the Iraqis escaping.

  The Americans moved swiftly. The detainees were transferred into a holding area, and a bulldozer sent across the centre of the compound. That caused part of the tunnel to collapse, but they were unable to find the exit, despite bulldozing parallel with the compound fence. It was only by luck that it was found, considerably further away than the Americans had believed possible.

  Oddly, it wasn’t completely filled in: on 16 April, eleven detainees were able to access part of the tunnel and use it to escape. All of them were recaptured. As a result of the tunnel’s discovery, and another riot that took place at the start of April, Camp Bucca was reorganized: the tents were replaced by buildings with proper concrete foundations. Although detainees tried to dig a further tunnel, unsuccessfully, there were few other reported escapes during Bucca’s period of operation.

  The first breakout which really attracted the attention of the world’s press came when suicide bombers blew up trucks outside the main gates of Kandahar’s Sarposa prison on the night of Friday 13 June 2008. This had followed unrest at the prison, with hundreds of the 1,100 prisoners going on hunger strike the previous month – forty-seven of them stitched their mouths together in protest – complaining about being held for over two years without trial. There were also allegations of torture.

  The prison itself was meant to be a showcase for Western methods in Afghanistan: Canadian prison officials had been sent over to train the guards and teach them about human rights. New uniforms were issued to the guards, and the towers of the sixty-year-old building were freshly painted.

  This made it even more of a tempting target for the Taliban, who had been increasing their operations in the area around Kandahar, traditionally regarded as the home of the rulers of Afghanistan. At 9.20 p.m. a water tanker filled with explosives was driven to the front gates and detonated, destroying part of the mud walls of the prison. In the confusion following the explosion, a group of around thirty insurgents armed with rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles rode in on motorcycles and began their attack, massacring fifteen guards, and heading for the political section of the prison, where the Taliban suspects were held. Another suicide bomber tried to destroy the rear gates, but the explosion didn’t have the desired effect.

  Initial estimates suggested that 1,200 inmates were freed over the next half hour
, including around 450 hardline militants – non-political prisoners took advantage of the situation and ran for the pomegranate groves surrounding the prison. Coalition troops were based on the far side of the city: by the time they got there, the inmates had dispersed, with many of the Taliban boarding minibuses that were waiting for them outside the prison walls. Some early reports tried to claim that the guards had prevented 200 prisoners from leaving, but it soon became clear that no one had remained incarcerated, making it one of the largest ever prison breaks in history, dwarfing the 798 who escaped from Fort San Cristobal in 1938 (see chapter 7).

  “We released all the prisoners, including 450 Taliban, we killed most of the guards, and we blocked the roads into the city so that our fighters could escape,” Qari Yusuf Ahmadi, a Taliban spokesman for southern Afghanistan, announced to the press. “This was our first attack in the very heart of Kandahar, and this is a signal to the puppet government of Hamid Karzai and the infidel government of the West that they should not forget the Taliban.”

  Supporters of the Canadian involvement in Afghanistan were disheartened by the success of the Taliban operation. “The message this attack sends is that the insurgents can act with relative impunity even into downtown Kandahar,” said Colin Kenny, the head of the Canadian senate’s committee on security and national defence. “The other message it sends is to the insurgent rank and file: if you get captured, we’ll get you out.” The facility was rebuilt as a result of the raid, with several million dollars spent to ensure that there were no further breaches of security. Three years later, Sarposa prison was the cause of fresh embarrassment for the Coalition.

  The Iraqi city of Tikrit was the scene of another mass breakout, with 109 prison officials and guards detained after sixteen prisoners were able to escape from a bathroom window in a palace that used to belong to Saddam Hussein. Just before midnight on 24 June 2009, they pried open the window and made their getaway down a twelve-foot-high concrete wall before the guards noticed. Although the police didn’t believe that any of the guards were actively complicit in the escape, there “was great negligence” on their part.

  House-to-house enquiries located two of the missing men and military working dogs were provided by the US Army to assist with the search. Five of the prisoners had links to al-Qaeda, and all of these were recaptured along with at least two others (one Iraqi news source suggested that all bar four were eventually caught). The location of the prison was moved to Tasfirat.

  Such escapes weren’t uncommon. In November 2009, thirteen inmates, including three key Taliban commanders, tunnelled out of the facility at Farah Prison; nine workers at the jail were arrested in connection with the breakout. Only one of the fugitives was recaptured, who revealed that the tunnel had taken ten days to dig, and they had hoped to empty the prison, which housed around 300 detainees, even though it was only designed to hold eighty.

  Twenty-three suspects were able to get through a brick wall in Mosul, in northern Iraq on 2 April 2010 between being served breakfast at 6 a.m. and midday lunchtime. They had begun work the previous day, but used a blanket to cover the hole in the wall. The guards had noticed that it was unusual, but not taken any action, and as a result found themselves under suspicion.

  Farah was the site of another jailbreak on 17 July 2010 which took a leaf out of the Kandahar Taliban’s book. At 11 p.m., a suicide bomber attacked a police patrol but was killed before he could explode his device; police therefore rushed to the scene. An hour later, the Taliban attacked four security checkpoints, diverting police further. Then at 3 a.m., they blew up the prison gate; at the same time Taliban prisoners blew the locks off their cells using explosives that had been smuggled into the jail. One policeman was killed and four inmates were injured by the explosions. At least fourteen prisoners were able to get away.

  Six months later, on 14 January 2011, twelve militants linked to the Sunni insurgent group, the Islamic State of Iraq, simply walked out of a prison in Basra in southern Iraq. They took the precaution of obtaining police uniforms first, but had no problems in passing the prison guards. They were the only prisoners held there, so one might have expected them to be spotted. In a statement of the obvious, Ali Ghanim al-Maliki, head of the security committee at Basra’s provincial council, said, “Of course, there was collusion from within the compound, but we do not know who is involved at the moment.” None of the guards was charged with any offence.

  (According to a Reuters report of this incident, the militants were smuggled out by one of the guards who claimed there was an order to transfer them to another prison. This may, however, have been conflating accounts with an escape from Karkh prison in Baghdad in the summer of 2009, when the warden drove the insurgents out of the facility, which was referenced in local reports of this escape.)

  April 2011 however, saw one of the biggest propaganda coups for the Taliban, when nearly 500 prisoners were released after the Mujahadeen were able to tunnel their way into Sarposa prison, the supposedly escape-proof jail in Kandahar. Despite the millions lavished on it, it wasn’t as impregnable as the Coalition believed – Afghan president Hamid Karzai described the escape as a “disaster”.

  At around 4 a.m. on 25 April, the Governor of Kandahar, Tooryali Wisa, was notified that around 487 Taliban prisoners, including some of their senior commanders, had escaped. For five months a team of eighteen men had dug a tunnel that stretched over a thousand feet, seven feet underground, beneath the main Kandahar-Herat highway. It was five feet high, with battery-powered lights, and small fans providing air.

  According to an account of the escape in the Arabic-language magazine Al-Somood, the Mujahedeen involved in the digging rented a house opposite the south corner of the prison, and refitted a room within the building, bringing in various concrete-making machines. At night they dug, and moved the dirt out in wheelbarrows attached to children’s bicycles, and then sold the soil. They hit a snag when they realized that they hadn’t been digging on a true course towards the prison – so they downloaded a map off the internet! They needed to bring people out from two separate locations, so they first dug to the arrest room, and confirmed that they were on target by raising a blade into the room through the dirt floor. They then continued the tunnel onto the main room, which held over 500 prisoners. When they had ascertained that they were in the right place (having first tried to come up a room early!), they passed the word to their contacts within the prison that the escape would be happening that night.

  Four Taliban Mujahedeen went down the tunnel taking carjacks and solid iron poles to break through the floor. The arrest room was easy to access, but the floor of the political ward was heavy-duty concrete, and it took some time for them to break through it. However, once they had cut a huge hole, they passed guns and daggers up to the three inmates who had been aware of the tunnel’s existence. They then went from cell to cell, inviting their comrades to join the escape. Some of these were freed from their cells with keys provided by “friends” within the prison, and around a third of the prison population made their way slowly along the tunnel over a four-and-a-half-hour period. Fresh clothes were waiting for them at the far end, as were vehicles to disperse them around the area. The Taliban claimed that they had a “martyrdom-seeking group” on standby in case there was any difficulties with the guard, but they weren’t needed. According to them, 541 prisoners escaped; the operation cost around $20,000.

  The first that the authorities knew of it was when a guard came on duty the next morning to find a completely empty building. Information on the escape had deliberately been kept to a minimum within the prison, to avoid any betrayal – the Taliban noted that known informers were knocked out during the escape.

  Sixty-five of the prisoners were quickly caught, with a further two killed while resisting arrest. The majority, however, were quickly able to rejoin the fight. As one of the escapers told the press, “We had the full support of the people of Kandahar, who provided us with clothes and safe places to go. We have proved tha
t whatever we want to do in Kandahar or anywhere else in the country, we can do it.”

  The Taliban didn’t confine audacious plans to Iran and Afghanistan; in the early morning of 15 April 2012, hundreds of militants attacked the prison in Bannu, in north-west Pakistan. For more than two hours, they laid siege to the prison, entering the complex in at least fifty cars and pickup trucks, and throwing grenades. They were able to free 384 of the 944 inmates, including twenty-one who were on death row – although the authorities weren’t exactly sure who, to begin with, since the Taliban destroyed the prison records during the attack. According to a BBC report, the guards called for help, but no one came for more than an hour and a half. Around a hundred of the escapees turned themselves in.

  A couple of months later, on 7 June, the Taliban set off a bomb outside a prison in the northern Afghan province of Sare-Pol, which destroyed the walls. Prisoners promptly started to make their way out, although, for once, the guards were being attentive, and opened fire. Three inmates were killed in the subsequent gun battle, and many were quickly recaptured, although around fourteen evaded arrest. The Taliban claimed that 170 prisoners were freed. Sar-e-Pol police chief Abdul Yaqoob Zabuli and prison director Colonel Mohammad Aslam were both sacked the next day.

  Fifteen Afghan field commanders who had been sentenced to death escaped from the Pul-e-Charkhi Prison, east of Kabul on 20 August. According to a report in the Russian press, “a large group of death-row prisoners ‘vanished’ from the third cell of the sixth block of the penitentiary”. However, a couple of days later, the authorities said that there had been an attempted escape, but it was foiled by the guards. “To respect Eid, we wanted to provide a facility for the prisoners to congratulate each other during the Eid days and we opened the doors of the cells,” the Central Prison Directorate Chief General Amir Mohammad Jamshid explained. “Taking advantage of this, eight prisoners managed to reach the prison yard but they were then identified and detained by the security guards.”