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Police form team to hunt down 7 Sorong prison escapees
Local police have formed a special team tasked with recapturing seven inmates who escaped early on Tuesday morning from Sorong Penitentiary, the site of last year's jailbreak involving 53 convicts, 21 of whom are still at large.
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Stock illustration of a prison inmate (Shutterstock/Skyward Kick Productions)
T
he Sorong Police have launched a new team to hunt down seven inmates who escaped from Southwest Papua’s Sorong Penitentiary in the early hours on Tuesday.
Sorong Police chief Sr. Comr. Happy Perdana Yudianto said the special task force was an addition to the efforts to apprehend the escapees that had been underway since the jailbreak.
"We have gathered the identities of all of the escapees. The team will distribute their wanted posters at ports, airports and major roads connecting regencies across Southwest Papua," he said on Wednesday, as quoted by Kompas.com.
"I urge the escapees to turn yourselves in. We have your names and addresses and sooner or later, we will catch all of you. I also call on the escapees’ families to come forward and report to authorities if [you] have any information about their whereabouts," he added.
According to Hensa Susanto, who heads the Southwest Papua Corrections Office, said on Wednesday that the inmates escaped around 4 a.m. on April 1 through a hole in the prison wall they made using a stainless steel spoon.
"The bottom of the wall had become brittle due to frequent flooding," Susanto said, adding that the seven escaped inmates were serving sentences for various crimes, including theft, assault and drug offenses.
One escapee identified only as AA is a member of a local separatist group, according to the local corrections chief. AA had been handed down a 20-year prison sentence after he was convicted for killing four Indonesian Military (TNI) soldiers during a 2021 attack on the Kisor Subdistrict Military Command with other separatists.
