Authorities in Italy are racing to trace down a person after he broke out of the utmost security wing of Milan’s Opera prison through the weekend in what has turn into his fourth successful escape from custody. Police rolled out patrols, checkpoints and tighter border controls inside hours, anxious that the 41-year-old Albanian inmate Taulant Toma may try to leave the country before anyone catches a sight of him.
Toma, dubbed ‘the wizard of escapes’ by Italian press, managed his latest breakout on Saturday, using a tried and tested escape method that also feels ever-so-slightly more Hollywood than real life. He reportedly sawed through the iron bars of his cell using a file stolen from the prison workshop after which climbed down an outer wall using a cobbled-together rope system that involved knotted bedsheets, Euronews reports. He then scaled a six metre wall and vanished away into the darkness.
The person’s sentence for robbery and other crimes runs all the best way up until October 2048, which can thoroughly explain his determination to maintain slipping through the ‘high-security’ cracks. Prosecutors noted that staff at Opera were in the midst of a shift change when Toma made his move; a detail that investigators consider crucial to understanding how the escape was allowed to have happened and gone unnoticed.
It’s not the primary time that Toma has tested the boundaries of European prison design. He first broke out of Terni prison back in 2009. But his most talked about escape got here in February 2013 when he fled from the utmost security wing in Parma alongside fellow inmate Vamentin Frokaj. Frokaj was later killed by a jeweller during a house invasion in 2015, a grim twist that became a part of the escape’s legacy in Italian criminal lore.
After the 2013 Parma breakout, police spent a full 40 days looking for Toma. Only to learn he’d already been arrested over in Belgium and held in Liège awaiting extradition. Even that didn’t last long. He managed to flee from Belgian custody a number of months later, adding one more chapter to a file that now spans two countries.
Back in Milan, investigators are actually reviewing CCTV from Opera prison to see if Toma had some sort of assistance on the surface. The episode has renewed criticism of Italy’s overstretched penal system which unions say has made even maximum security wings harder to secure. Opera held 1,338 inmates in spaces built for 918 on the time of the escape. While only 533 officers were on duty despite a necessity for a minimum of 811 to ensure that the prison to run properly.
Gennarino De Fazio, secretary general of the penitentiary police union UILPA, said that the most recent incident once more exposes deep structural failures, stating: ‘This umpteenth episode, combined with the drama that’s experienced daily in prisons, further certifies the failure of the prison policies conducted by governments for a minimum of the last 25 years’. He added that the situation ‘violates the elemental human rights of inmates’ and puts ‘prison police corps operators to a really hard test’. (Pictures: AFP/Getty Images)
If a bedsheet-based jailbreak sounds unusual, you could well be surprised to learn that they occur a bit greater than you may expect. While not super common, with degrading prison facilities the world over, it’s not even the one such prison escape up to now week. Authorities in Louisiana were forced to mount a manhunt after a trio of men facing various charges broke out of the St. Landry Parish jail in Opelousas on December 2. The three inmates escaped by removing loose concrete blocks from a crumbling wall then climbing out using knotted sheets. One later died through the search, one was recaptured and the third stays on the run. (Picture: St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office)
