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Jailbreak prompts huge search

A combo of screen grabs from Chinese Inner Mongolia TV taken yesterday shows the faces and personal details of the four Chinese prisoners who broke out of jail after kidnapping and killing a guard in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China. PHOTO: AFP

Police have launched a massive manhunt for four inmates who killed a guard and escaped from a northern Chinese prison over the weekend.

The four, all serving life sentences, fled Hohhot’s No. 2 Prison in a stolen taxi on Saturday, the official China Daily newspaper and other media reported yesterday. It said a second guard was also injured in the escape.

More than 6,000 police and security officers have been deployed in the search for the men, who are believed to be hiding in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, the paper said.

Authorities have set up more than 150 roadblocks in and around the city.

Calls to the Hohhot prison and police headquarters rang unanswered. A man with the publicity office of Hohhot’s Communist Party committee said yesterday there was no update on the situation.

After the four killed the guard, one of them dressed in his uniform and led the others to the prison’s main gate, where they were stopped by another guard, said Liu Haidong, director of Hohhot’s public security bureau command center.

“That police officer realized that he had not seen this ‘officer’ before and therefore questioned his identity. The four men attacked him with a knife and then fled,” Liu was quoted as saying in an interview with China Radio International.

The inmates hijacked a passing taxi and then commandeered a second one when the first ran out of gas, the China Daily reported.

Another newspaper, the Global Times, said nine people working in the jail were found to be criminally liable for the prison break, citing a report in the official newspaper of the state prosecutor’s office. It gave no further details.
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