After an incredible escape in the North, two detainees arrested in Belgium

The two detainees who had seen the The bars of their cells at the Quiévrechain juvenile penitentiary (North) and escaped during the night of Sunday in Paris. Monday, were arrested Monday in Belgium, announced the Lille public prosecutor's office.

These minors, aged 17 and suspected of murder, the other of rape according to a source close to the case, “were arrested this evening in Belgium”, the prosecutor announced on X of the Republic Carole Etienne.

They were placed in police custody, she told AFP.

An investigation had been opened earlier in the day on the charge of “organized gang escape” indicated the prosecution, specifying that they risked “10 years of imprisonment and a fine of 150,000 euros.”

According to the source close to the file, they used saw blades to file down the bars of their cells in the establishment located on the Franco-Belgian border.

The two young men then used ” pieces of sheet torn off” and “tied up to go down” on the other side of the prison, continued a second source close to the case, specifying that one is Algerian and the other Palestinian.

This story joins that of a Ufap union source, according to which the detainees, two unaccompanied minors, would have, after sawing their bars, “braided their sheets to climb the roof and go down to the other side” then “that a vehicle was waiting for them outside.”

“The license plate was noted by the city's video surveillance and they left in the direction of Belgium, very close to the establishment “, said this source.

– “Big pedigrees” –

The Quiévrechain juvenile prison, 20 km from Valenciennes, opened in September 2007 to accommodate sixty minors aged 13 to 18, indicates the general controller of places of deprivation of liberty (CGLPL) in a 2019 report.

Its opening led to the closure of the areas for minors in the remand centers of Valenciennes (North), Lille and Amiens.

According to the Interregional Directorate of Prison Services (DISP) of Lille, 38 boys and two girls are currently detained there.

“It was noted more than a year ago that young people could try to cut the bars with the forks and knives with which they ate,” Guy Ryckewaert, 1st supervisor at Quiévrechain and Ufap-Unsa union delegate, told AFP.

“The prison administration considers establishments for minors to be small establishments with people of low criminal category when, unfortunately for us, we have terrorists,” he regretted. “We have no watchtower, no electrified protection, while we are starting to have young people with big pedigrees.”

For the FO Justice union, these escapes are the result of ” an explosive cocktail including the lack of staff numbers”, “the overwork of agents”, and “the placement of inappropriate detainees in this establishment”, according to a press release on its website.

This double escape follows the evaporation during the night from Saturday to Sunday of an inmate from the Fresnes penitentiary center hospitalized at the Kremlin-Bicêtre – at a time when the resounding trial of the “king of beauty”, Rédoine Faïd, is being held in Paris.

Mid-September, two inmates from the Fleury-Mérogis remand center (Essonne) escaped during an outing in the Fontainebleau forest (Seine-et-Marne), claiming a pressing desire. One of the two has since been arrested.

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