Trikala Prison Escapees Still At Large - Police Continue Manhunt
In such a framework, authorities have set up road blocks to all road accesses leading to the Greek-Albanian border, while patrols were also scouring the surrounding mountains where passage routes to the neighboring country abound. Police have trained police dogs with them, while thermal cameras are also being used at night.
Four of the escapees had been trapped by police in the vicinity of the jail, while the two that were arrested on Saturday are Albanian nationals aged 27 and 30.
According to reports, the escape was staged with help from unknown persons who were stationed in two cars outside of the prison and who began to fire at the guards as a diversionary tactic while the eleven men climbed out with ropes, hooks and self-made ladders.
According to a Justice Ministry announcement, the escape was "unprecedented and planned like a military operation, using Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades," and apparently it occurred at a time while the convicts had not returned to their cells yet.
The ministry noted that:
"Unknown persons, split into two groups, with two vehicles and heavy arms, opened fire at the guards (from) outside (of the prison) and of the vehicle used by the jail patrol which was parked outside the jail and was caught in the cross-fire."The jail is surrounded by swat teams and the searches have so far not turned up additional firearms or shells that would confirm the use of firearms by convicts inside the jail during the escape attempt, the ministry added.
An additional two police cars, one in motion and the other parked, were also attacked.
"During the fire exchange that lasted over half an hour and turned the area into a battlefield two guards outside were injured in the abdomen, one of them seriously. It was determined that 11 foreign nationals convicted over robberies and thefts managed to escape from the G2 jail wing after taking advantage of the armed clash of outsiders with the forces there."
Justice Minister Antonis Roupakiotis who rushed to Trikala and apparently visited the injured guards at the town's main Hospital on Saturday afternoon, accompanied by deputy minister Costas Karagounis and the ministry secretary general. Later on he went to the prison where he was briefed on the circumstances surrounding the attack on the prison guards and jailbreak.
Following this he said that a "perfectly organized plan" had been executed, during which hundreds of gunshots were fired and hand grenades thrown, of which five exploded, seriously injuring two members of the prison outside guards, while also immobilizing the police car and guards' car stationed at the facility.
The Minister revealed that it was an unprecedented operation, and stressed that:
"up to know we were discussing how to prevent someone escaping from inside, since that is where the danger existed ... Now we have to redesign the guarding of the prisons, because as it seems, with the form that organized crime has taken, then there is a threat of interventions from the outside to help those on the inside (escape)".Following Friday's prison break, law enforcement authorities believe that notorious mafia boss Panagiotis Vlastos was preparing a new attempt to break out of the Trikala incarceration facility, after an attempted prison break by the notorious inmate by helicopter was foiled by authorities a month ago. In fact police press spokesman Christos Parthenis said on Saturday that after the escape of the 11 inmates a search was conducted of Vlastos' cell, and it turned up five blades, four saws and two knives.
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