Hunt for escaped prisoner Daniel Abed Khalife: Why wasn’t terror suspect banged up in fashionable Belmarsh?

Most terror suspects are stored in Belmarsh jail, thought-about the UK’s most safe. 

It’s so tough to get out and in that legal professionals complain about their very own entry to go to their shoppers.

They usually cite the huge safety checks as the rationale for delays in courtroom instances.

Jail breakouts are uncommon and no prisoner has ever escaped from Belmarsh, a class A jail in southeast London, although some have tried.

So why wasn’t Daniel Abed Khalife, a suspect dealing with severe terror prices, banged up in fashionable Belmarsh?

Instead he was awaiting his trial in HMP Wandsworth, a class B jail in southwest London constructed 170 years in the past and described in a watchdog report two years in the past as “overcrowded, crumbling, vermin-infested” and struggling with employees shortages.

The identical report mentioned an inmate managed to flee from Wandsworth in 2019 and highlighted persevering with considerations about safety.

And do not forget that as a soldier, Khalife, 21, would have been educated to flee captivity of all types and take psychological benefit of much less skilled captors.

That could go a protracted technique to clarify how he was in a position, because it’s thought, to hide under a food delivery truck and hold on because it left the kitchen space the place it is believed he was working as a chef.

“The issue is one of routine, coupled with prison staff shortages,” mentioned Mark Leech, editor of the Prisons Handbook for England and Wales.

“Perhaps the use of civilian caterers who are not trained prison officers, along with gate security procedures that just become routine and which he may well have spotted while going to court.”

The public could be stunned to study {that a} younger terror suspect, accused of gathering particulars of his colleagues that could possibly be helpful to a terrorist and amassing info that could possibly be helpful to an enemy, had a diminished safety danger score – not A however B.

Mr Leech mentioned: “That is something that in hindsight they will want to review and the investigation will look into that.

“He could nicely have given the impression to inexperienced employees who performed his safety categorisation that he was far much less of a safety escape danger than in actuality he actually was.”

Police seem confident Khalife will be caught soon, but some Wandsworth escapees stay free for a very long time.

Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs climbed over the wall with a rope ladder and jumped to a waiting removals van to flee Wandsworth in 1965.

He did return, however solely by his personal selection.

He wasn’t arrested till his airplane landed within the UK, 36 years later.