Escape from prison on New Year's Eve. While everyone was celebrating the end of 2021, two inmates put into practice a plan they had been studying for some time, becoming the protagonists of a film escape from the Vercelli prison.

They sawed up the bars and tied the sheets to descend from the fourth floor. However, one of the two broke his arm and was immediately captured, the other managed to escape thanks to some accomplices who were waiting for him in the car.

And the manhunt immediately started. The fugitive, Kristjan Mehilli, 27 years old of Albanian origin, is considered "very dangerous". He was in his cell for a series of villa robberies between Piedmont and Lombardy: he was part of the "ice-eyed" gang that in 2018 in the Alessandria area broke into the villa of Riccardo Coppo, a well-known wine entrepreneur from Monferrato, taking away cash and valuables for around 40 thousand euros. “If you don't take me to the safe I'll shoot you”, the threat to the entrepreneur, who was pointed a gun to his head several times during the robbery.

Armed and violent, the bandits acted with military techniques, the same probably used to prepare the escape of Mehilli who - arrested in May 2019 - was to serve a sentence until 2029. Checkpoints have been set up throughout Piedmont, and not only.

Donato Capece, general secretary of the Sappe prison police union, speaks of "announced escape". "For some time - he denounces - the internal security of prisons has been annihilated by wicked measures such as dynamic surveillance and an open regime, the removal of the sentries of the Penitentiary Police from the prison walls, the lack of policemen penitentiaries, the lack of funding for anti-intrusion and anti-climb-over services, as evidenced by the shame of the Vercelli prison wall which has been out of use for years in the indifference of the ministerial and departmental leaders despite our complaints. If we had been listened to, this escape probably would not have happened ”.

(Unioneonline / L)