http://www.sundayworld.com/top-stories/c...-escape-in-1973Helicopter jail break mimics IRA Mountjoy escape in 1973.
Another audacious prison escape with a helicopter, replicating the IRA escape from Mountjoy of 1973, has taken place forty years later in a Canadian jail as three underworld figures on murder charges climbed a rope to freedom.
The three criminals facing drugs and murder charges escaped from Quebec City, detention centre and had been awaiting trial since 2010.
The public have been warned not to approach the men who Canadian mounties have described as likely “armed and dangerous”.
This is the second helicopter jail break with in just over a year with two other serious criminal escaping in similar fashion last March from the same Quebec prison, to the great embarrassment of the Canadian Prison Service.
Those men were captured within hours but it seems that the current escapees will be more successful.
“Priority number one is to locate the helicopter and the three escapees that are inside that helicopter,” prison spokesperson Ann Mathieu told CTV News.
“We are really working closely with the detention centre for all the information that we can possess on those individuals,” she told local news outlets.
The three men, Denis Lefebvre, Serge Pomerleau and Yves Denis bolted on Saturday evening.
Helicopter escapes have gone in and out of vogue but one of the first and most successful was the escape of three IRA prisoners from Mountjoy Prison’s D wing at 3.40pm in on October 31 in 1973 2hihc say IRA leaders Seamus Twomey, JB O’Hagen and Kevin Mallon break free onto a helicopter which had been hijacked.
Prison Officers said that they thought that Minister of Defence Paddy Donegan was landing. The escape made it into prison and republican folklore.
France shares the dubious record for the most number of helicopter escapes with 11 and one prisoner escaped three times using the same method. Convicted murder Pascal Payet escaped three times between 2001 and 2007 but the first escape ever by helicopter was Joel David Kaplan who escaped from a Mexican jail in what he called the “ten second jailbreak”.
Hollywood has captured the drama of the helicopter escape in Ray Liotta’s ‘No Escape’ from 1994 but the movie cannot come close to the great prison escape movies which always captures our imagination from ‘The Shawshank Redemption” to “Escape to Victory” in 1981 with Pele and Sylvester Stalone.
