2 inmates saw through bars and fled Dijon prison using bed sheets, highlighting France’s severe prison overcrowding crisis and staffing issues.
DIJON: Two prisoners escaped from a French jail using bed sheets after sawing through their cell bars, prosecutors confirmed on Thursday.
Guards discovered the escape from the Dijon prison shortly before dawn, according to prison authorities.
Dijon prosecutor Olivier Caracotch said the pair “seem to have sawn through bars” and “fled using bed sheets”.
One fugitive was a 19-year-old man held in pre-trial detention for attempted murder.
The other, a 32-year-old detained for threats and violence against a partner, left a message saying he had been held for “too long”.
Approximately 100 police officers were deployed to track the escapees.
Union official Ahmed Saih confirmed inmates used “old-fashioned, manual saw blades” for the breakout.
“We’ve been warning about the risk of a jail break for months,” Saih said, referencing earlier discoveries of saw blades within the facility.
He demanded increased staffing and improved equipment including “gratings that cannot be sawn through”.
The Dijon prison, constructed in 1853, suffers from severe overcrowding with 311 inmates crammed into space designed for 180.
“Prison is very hard here,” said a recently released inmate who spent eight months in the facility.
“There were three of us in a cell: two on bunk beds and one sleeping on the floor,” he described outside the prison gates.
This incident follows another escape in Rennes less than two weeks earlier, where a convict fled during an outing to a planetarium.
Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin subsequently fired the Rennes prison director.
Three prison directors’ unions criticized Darmanin for prioritizing supermax prisons for drug traffickers while neglecting regular facilities.
They accused him of “devoting all the resources of a debt-ridden state” to high-security prisons while other jails suffer.
Darmanin recently announced RM30 million for the Dijon facility as part of a programme to eliminate mobile phones from six French prisons.
France ranks third worst in Europe for prison overcrowding, according to a July Council of Europe report.
The national average stands at 135 inmates per 100 available spaces, while Dijon’s rate reaches nearly 173 per 100.
Notorious drug baron Mohamed Amra was recently transferred to a new supermax prison after his dramatic May 2024 escape that left two guards dead. – AFP
