A British prisoner serving time at a Portuguese jail for kidnap and robbery has managed to escape by ‘climbing up a ladder’.
Mark Roscaleer, 39, is one of the five inmates who escaped from the Vale de Judeus Prison in Alcoentre, Lisbon, just before 10am today.
In 2019, the Cheshire-born crook tried to flee from EP Lisbon while awaiting trial on robbery and kidnap charges by covering himself in oil to squeeze through the bars.
Guards, however, foiled this plan.
Portugal’s prison service said Roscaleer and four other inmates used a ‘ladder, which allowed the inmates to climb the wall’.
All five have been described as ‘extremely dangerous’ and had to be accompanied at all times by guards and security teams when leaving their cells.
They include: Fernando Ribeiro Ferreira, 61, sentenced to 25 years for drug trafficking, criminal association, theft, robbery and kidnapping; Rodolf José Lohrmann, 59, sentenced to 18 years and 10 months for criminal association, theft, robbery, false declarations and money laundering; Shergili Farjiani, 40, sentenced to seven years for the crimes of theft, violence after the theft and forgery of documents and Fábio Fernandes Santos Loureiro, 33, sentenced to 25 years for the crimes of trafficking in minor quantities, criminal association, extortion, money laundering, insult, aggravated theft, resisting and coercing an official and driving without a legal licence.
Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, the president of Portugal, said an investigation has been launched into the prison break.
Speaking from Belém, he said: ‘The government… will not fail to inform the Portuguese people
Roscaleer has tried to break out of jail several times. He turned himself in to police in 2015, aged 26, after bolting from HMP Kirkham in Lancashire following nine days on the run.
He was serving seven years and four months for threatening to smash a victim’s skill with a hammer during a raid on an Ellesmere Port pub in 2012. Roscaleer and his accomplice stole £6,300.
Roscaleer, from Runcorn, was jailed for nine years in June 2020 after a trial in Algarve. Prosecutors said he and his accomplice robbed a man at gunpoint before subjecting him to ‘cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment’ to cough up more money.
He had been accused of placing a battery cable clamp on the victim’s nipple and genitals at an abandoned house in the Faro District.
The victim then revealed to Roscaleer and his accomplice, Robert George Anthony Wood, 20, where he had hidden thousands of pounds.
Roscaleer and the four other’s prison break today is believed to have been premeditated.
‘They went out of the cells into the courtyard and then, with a ladder that was hidden outside, they climbed over the six-metre-high wall and escaped,’ a prison guard told the Portuguese newspaper Expresso.
The guard said the aluminium ladder was ‘camouflaged in the wall’, adding: ‘You can’t even see them in the video surveillance images.’ The newspaper said one of the surveillance cameras in the area at the time of the escape was turned off.
Three individuals were waiting outside the lockup holding a net for the men to leap into, the guard added. All five ‘got into a small black Mercedes’.
Frederico Morais, the president of the National Union of Prison Guards Corps, added to PÚBLICO that two men on the outside put up the ladder while a third person waited in the getaway car.
It was only ‘at noon’ that prison officials raised the alarm – midday is when prisoners are served lunch – something that Morais chalked up to a prison system starved of funding by the state.
‘In the past, there were surveillance towers where there was always a guard,’ he said, ‘but in 2017/2018, due to the lack of guards, the state dismantled the towers and invested in video surveillance cameras.
‘But the cameras do go after anyone.’
Vale de Judeus is a high-security facility that houses more than 500 inmates, with a maximum capacity of 560, according to the Portuguese justice ministry.
But only about 120 guards work at the jail, according to Morais, with shift patterns meaning there are only up to 30 on any given day.
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