ROME -- Two Romanians are being hunted across Italy after escaping from Rebibbia prison.  They had filed down some bars of a window and then used knotted-together sheets to climb over the walls.  The two fugitives are 36-year-old Catalin Ciobanu, who was arrested for kidnapping and homicide, and 28-year-old Florin Mihai Diaconescu, who was imprisoned for armed robbery and receiving stolen goods.

 They escaped from the G11 branch, where the workers for the new “low-security” prison are housed.

 Ciobanu and Diaconescu had managed to get hold of a file, which they used to break through the bars of the warehouse in which they were working.  From there they found themselves in the walking yard of the complex, which is uncovered.  This allowed them to scale the walls and drop down onto the Via Tiburtina, which runs along next to the prison.

 Whilst the alarm was raised soon after the prisoners’ escape, which took place around 6.30pm on Saturday evening, when guards realised they had not returned to their cell, the fugitives had already vanished.  It’s likely that an accomplice was waiting for waiting for them with a car nearby.

 In 2014 Catalin Ciobanu was accused of manslaughter, for provoking the death of an Egyptian business-owner living in Fidene.  Ciobanu had kidnapped him on behalf of another Egyptian business rival, causing the detainee to succumb to a heart attack, which killed him.  Though he fled to Romania with an accomplice he was arrested there for theft, before being extradited to Italy to be tried for the Egyptian’s death.

 According to investigators the two escapees must have started filing the bars of the window used for the escape over several occasions, hiding the sheets in the warehouse before the escape, so that nobody noticed anything during their inspections.  The department of penitentiary administration has opened an internal investigation to find out how this oversight occurred, whilst photos of the escapees have been circulated to the entire Italian police force, who have set up road blocks.

 This is not the first time that prisoners have escaped from Rebibbia – two years ago two Roman prisoners convicted for armed robbery and drugs managed to escape in a similar fashion, filing down the bars of a window and jumping the walls using sheets.  Those two were caught just a few days later.  Several days after that, there were another couple who tried to escape in an AMA lorry, however they were discovered before they could get outside the prison walls.

 Their textbook escape has sparked controversy over prison controls. “The National Federation for Security in Lazio believes that the 14 prisons in the Lazio region are understaffed and no longer meet the functional needs of the institution, in the face of a continued surplus of inmates over the expected prison capacity,” reported Deputy Secretary, General Massimo Costantino.

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