The man known as Belgium’s ”king of jailbreaks” hit the country’s headlines on Monday as his gang staged a spectacular helicopter crash to help him break out of high-security prison for the fourth time.
The escape of 27-year-old Nordin Benallal, a convict with a long history of violent crimes, was launched soon after sunset on Sunday, as the inmates of the high-security Ittre prison near Brussels were walking around the exercise yard.
A helicopter flew over the prison and hovered over the exercise yard. One prisoner immediately jumped up and caught hold of the machine’s landing skid, causing it to spin out of control and crash.
The impact of the crash severed the inmate’s leg, local media reported.
In the chaos that followed, an armed man jumped out of the helicopter and passed a weapon to Benallal. The two then took two guards hostage, escaped through a door that had been opened to evacuate the injured man and made off in a Volkswagen Golf equipped with a flashing police light.
Subsequent investigations revealed that the helicopter had been a prototype hijacked by three or four of Benallal’s accomplices, all armed and wearing masks, the Belga news agency wrote.
Benallal has a prison career behind him. His first sentence came in 1998, when he was jailed for five years for robbery with violence, and he subsequently received sentences totalling 50 years for further violent offences.
Of his three prior jailbreaks, the most dramatic was in 2004, when he escaped over the wall of a lower-security prison using a rope. The initial break-out passed without incident, but when two police officers tried to stop him some days later, he shot them both, leaving them critically injured.
The Ittre prison is one of Belgium’s highest-security jails. Its most notorious inmate is paedophile murderer Marc Dutroux.
It is the second time this year that a helicopter has been used to break out of a Belgian jail. The first such incident was in April at the Lantin prison in the French-speaking province of Wallonia.
On that occasion, a professional helicopter pilot was kidnapped and forced to fly his aircraft into the prison to help rescue French con man Erik Mathieu. — Sapa-dpa