An inmate who in 2016 organized a daring, elaborate jailbreak from a southern California facility was on Thursday found guilty of the escape, but acquitted of kidnapping a taxi driver while on the run, authorities said.
Jurors in the Orange County Superior Court also convicted Hossein Nayeri, 44, of stealing a van, but acquitted him of kidnapping during a carjacking and lesser offenses, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office said in a statement.
On Jan. 22, 2016, Nayeri and two other men broke out of the Orange County Central Jail Complex in Santa Ana, prompting a week-long search.
Photo: AP
Using smuggled tools, they cut through a metal grate in their maximum-security dorm cell, then climbed through plumbing shafts within the walls to reach the roof, where they rappelled down five stories using a rope made of bed linens, the authorities said, citing evidence including a cellphone video shot by Nayeri.
The men later kidnapped a 72-year-old unlicensed taxi driver. The driver was sometimes held at gunpoint as he drove the men around. The men then stole a van, and took both vehicles and the driver along as they drove hundreds of kilometers north to the San Francisco Bay Area, authorities said.
One escapee, Bac Tien Duong, later feared that the driver would be killed and fled with him back to southern California, authorities said.
Nayeri and the third escapee, Jonathan Tieu, were arrested in San Francisco the next day, after a man recognized them from media reports, prosecutors said.
Duong was convicted of escape and kidnapping in 2021.
Tieu is awaiting trial for the escape, prosecutors said.
TORTURE CONVICTION
At the time of his escape, Nayeri was awaiting trial on charges that he and two accomplices kidnapped, tortured and mutilated the owner of a marijuana dispensary in 2012.
The owner was kidnapped from a Newport Beach home because the robbers falsely believed he had buried US$1 million in the Mojave Desert, prosecutors said.
He was beaten with rubber piping, shocked with a Taser, burned with a blowtorch and his penis was cut off before the robbers fled, prosecutors said.
Nayeri fled to Iran, but he was later caught in the Czech Republic and extradited.
In 2020, he was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.
Nayeri’s codefendants were also convicted.
The US and the Philippines plan to announce new sites as soon as possible for an expanded Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), which gives the Western power access to military bases in the Southeast Asian country. Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr last month granted the US access to four military bases, on top of five existing locations under the 2014 EDCA, amid China’s increasing assertiveness regarding the South China Sea and Taiwan. Speaking at the Basa Air Base in Manila, one of the existing EDCA sites, US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall said the defense agreements between the two countries
‘DUAL PURPOSE’: Upgrading the port is essential for the Solomon Islands’ economy and might not be military focused, but ‘it is not about bases, it is about access,’ an analyst said The Solomon Islands has awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to a Chinese state company to upgrade an international port in Honiara in a project funded by the Asian Development Bank, a Solomon Islands official said yesterday. China Civil Engineering Construction Co (CCECC) was the only company to submit a bid in the competitive tender, Solomon Islands Ministry of Infrastructure Development official Mike Qaqara said. “This will be upgrading the old international port in Honiara and two domestic wharves in the provinces,” Qaqara said. Responding to concerns that the port could be deepened for Chinese naval access, he said there would be “no expansion.” The Solomon
CONFLICTING ACCOUNTS: The US destroyer’s routine operations in the South China Sea would have ‘serious consequences,’ the defense ministry said China yesterday threatened “serious consequences” after the US Navy sailed a destroyer around the disputed Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島) in the South China Sea for the second day in a row, in a move Beijing claimed was a breach of its sovereignty and security. The warning came amid growing tensions between China and the US in the region, as Washington pushes back at Beijing’s growingly assertive posture in the South China Sea, a strategic waterway it claims virtually in its entirety. On Thursday, after the US sailed the USS Milius guided-missile destroyer near the Paracel Islands, China said its navy and
Seven stories above a shop floor hawking cheap perfume and nylon underwear, Thailand’s “shopping mall gorilla” sits alone in a cage — her home for 30 years despite a reignited row over her captivity. Activists around the world have long campaigned for the primate to be moved from Pata Zoo, on top of a Bangkok mall, with singer Cher and actor Gillian Anderson adding their voices in 2020. However, the family who owns Bua Noi — whose name translates as “little lotus” — have resisted public and government pressure to relinquish the critically endangered animal. The gorilla has lived at Pata for more
RSS