Clones Failte – The Great Escape 1983 [25th Sept 1983] The Great Escape 1983 [25th Sept 1983] admin June 21, 2011 Comments Off The escape from the H-Blocks of Long Kesh (known as the Great Escape) took place on 25 September 1983. In the biggest prison escape in British history, 38 Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners, who had been convicted of offences including murder and causing explosions, escaped from H-Block 7 (H7) of the prison. One prison officer died of a heart attack as a result of the escape and twenty others were injured, including two who were shot with guns that had been smuggled into the prison.The escape was a propaganda coup for the IRA, and a British government minister faced calls to resign. The official inquiry into the escape placed most of the blame onto prison staff, who in turn blamed the escape on political interference in the running of the prison. HM Prison Maze was considered one of the most escape-proof prisons in Europe.

In addition to 15-foot (4.6 m) fences, each H-Block was encompassed by an 18-foot (5.5 m) concrete wall topped with barbed wire, and all gates on the complex were made of solid steel and electronically operated. Prisoners had been planning the escape for several months. Bobby Storey and Gerry Kelly had started working as orderlies in H7, which allowed them to identify weaknesses in the security systems, and six handguns had been smuggled into the prison. Shortly after 2:30 pm on 25 September, prisoners seized control of H7 by simultaneously taking the prison officers hostage at gunpoint in order to prevent them from triggering an alarm. One officer was stabbed with a craft knife, and another was knocked down by a blow to the back of the head. One officer who attempted to prevent the escape was shot in the head by Gerry Kelly, but survived. By 2:50 pm the prisoners were in total control of H7 without an alarm being raised. A dozen prisoners also took uniforms from the officers, and the officers were also forced to hand over their car keys and details of where their cars were, for possible later use during the escape.

A rear guard was left behind to watch over hostages and keep the alarm from being raised until they believed the escapees were clear of the prison, when they returned to their cells. At 3:25 pm, a lorry delivering food supplies arrived at the entrance to H7, where Brendan McFarlane and other prisoners took the occupants hostage at gunpoint and took them inside H7. The lorry driver was told the lorry was being used in the escape, and he was instructed what route to take and how to react if challenged. Bobby Storey told the driver that “This man [Gerry Kelly] is doing 30 years and he will shoot you without hesitation if he has to. He has nothing to lose”. At 3:50 pm the prisoners left H7, and the driver and a prison orderly were taken back to the lorry, and the driver’s foot tied to the clutch. 37 prisoners climbed into the back of the lorry, while Gerry Kelly lay on the floor of the cab with a gun pointed at the driver, who was also told the cab had been booby trapped with a hand grenade.

At nearly 4:00 pm the lorry drove towards the main gate of the prison, where the prisoners intended to take over the gatehouse. Ten prisoners dressed in guards’ uniforms and armed with guns and chisels dismounted from the lorry and entered the gatehouse, where they took the officers hostage. At 4:05 pm the officers began to resist, and an officer pressed an alarm button. When other staff responded via an intercom, a senior officer said while being held at gunpoint that the alarm had been triggered accidentally. By this time the prisoners were struggling to maintain control in the gatehouse due to the number of hostages. Officers arriving for work were entering the gatehouse from outside the prison, and each was ordered at gunpoint to join the other hostages. Officer James Ferris ran from the gatehouse towards the pedestrian gate attempting to raise the alarm, pursued by Dermot Finucane. Ferris had already been stabbed three times in the chest, and before he could raise the alarm he collapsed. Finucane continued to the pedestrian gate where he stabbed the officer controlling the gate, and two officers who had just entered the prison.

This incident was seen by a soldier on duty in a watch tower, who reported to the Army operations room that he had seen prison officers fighting. The operations room telephoned the prison’s Emergency Control Room (ECR), which replied that everything was all right and that an alarm had been accidentally triggered earlier. At 4:12 pm the alarm was raised when an officer in the gatehouse pushed the prisoner holding him hostage out of the room and telephoned the ECR. However, this was not done soon enough to prevent the escape. After several attempts the prisoners had opened the main gate, and were waiting for the prisoners still in the gatehouse to rejoin them in the lorry. At this time two prison officers blocked the exit with their cars, forcing the prisoners to abandon the lorry and make their way to the outer fence which was 25 yards away. Four prisoners attacked one of the officers and hijacked his car, which they drove towards the external gate. They crashed into a car near the gate and abandoned the car. Two escaped through the gate, one was captured exiting the car, and another was captured after being chased by a soldier.

At the main gate, a prison officer was shot in the leg while chasing the only two prisoners who had not yet reached the outer fence. The prisoner who fired the shot was captured after being shot and wounded by a soldier in a watch tower, and the other prisoner was captured after falling. The other prisoners escaped over the fence, and by 4:18 pm the main gate was closed and the prison secured, after 35 prisoners had successfully breached the perimeter of the prison. The escape was the biggest in British history, and the biggest in Europe since World War II. Outside the prison the IRA had planned a logistical support operation involving 100 armed members, but due to a miscalculation of five minutes the prisoners found no transport waiting for them and were forced to flee across fields or hijack vehicles. The British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary immediately activated a contingency plan, and by 4:25 pm a cordon of vehicle check points were in place around the prison, and others were later in place in strategic positions across Northern Ireland, resulting in the recapture of one prisoner at 11:00 pm.

Twenty prison officers were injured during the escape, thirteen were kicked and beaten, four stabbed, two shot, and another, James Ferris, died after suffering a heart attack during the escape. Top 10 Amazing Prison Escapes - Listverse Top 10 Amazing Prison Escapes Jamie Frater August 27, 2008 As long as we have had prisons, we have had prison escapes. This is a list of the 10 most daring and amazing escapes from prison in history. This adds to our collection of crime related lists, such as tips for escaping the cops , tips for committing the perfect crime , and prison survival tips . 10 Maze Prison Escape In the biggest prison escape in British history, on 25 September 1983 in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, 38 Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners, who had been convicted of offenses including murder and causing explosions, escaped from H-Block 7 (H7) of the prison. One prison officer died of a heart attack as a result of the escape and twenty others were injured, including two who were shot with guns that had been smuggled into the prison. HM Prison Maze was considered one of the most escape-proof prisons in Europe.

In addition to 15-foot fences, each H-Block was encompassed by an 18-foot concrete wall topped with barbed wire, and all gates on the complex were made of solid steel and electronically operated. Shortly after 2:30, the prisoners took control of the H-block holding the prison guards hostage at gunpoint. Some of the prisoners took the guards clothing and car keys in order to help with their escape. At 3:25, a truck bringing food supplies arrived and the prisoners told the driver that he was going to help them escape. They tied his foot to the clutch and told him where to drive. At 3:50 the truck left the H-block, and soon after the prison, carrying all 38 men. Over the next few days, 19 escapees were caught. The remaining escapees were assisted by the IRA in finding hiding places. Some of the group ended up in the USA but were later found and extradited. Due to politics in Northern Ireland, none of the remaining escapees are being actively sought and some have been given amnesties.

Note the wires strung across the yard in the picture above – this is to prevent helicopters from landing due to another escape attempt at Maze Prison. [ Image Source | Wikipedia ] 9 Alfred Hinds “Alfie” Hinds was a British criminal and escape artist who, while serving a 12 year prison sentence for robbery, successfully broke out of three high security prisons. Despite the dismissal of thirteen of his appeals to higher courts, he was eventually able to gain a pardon using his knowledge of the British legal system. After being sentenced to 12 years in prison for a jewelry robbery, Hinds escaped from Nottingham prison by sneaking through the locked doors and over a 20-foot prison wall for which he became known in the press as “Houdini” Hinds. After 6 months he was found and arrested. After his arrest, Hinds brought a lawsuit against authorities charging the prison commissioners with illegal arrest and successfully used the incident as a means to plan his next escape by having a padlock smuggled in to him while at the Law Courts.

Two guards escorted him to the toilet, but when they removed his handcuffs Alfie bundled the men into the cubicle and snapped the padlock onto screw eyes that his accomplices had earlier fixed to the door. He escaped into the crowd on Fleet Street but was captured at an airport five hours later. Hinds would make his third escape from Chelmsford Prison less than a year later. While eluding Scotland Yard, Hinds continued to plead his innocence sending memorandums to British MPs and granting interviews and taped recordings to the press. He would continue to appeal his arrest and, following a technicality in which prison escapes are not listed as misdemeanors within British law, his final appeal before the House of Lords in 1960 was denied after a three hour argument by Hinds before his return to serve 6 years in Parkhurst Prison. Pictured above is Nottingham Prison – the first prison that Hinds escaped from. [ Wikipedia ] 8 The Texas Seven The Texas 7 was a group of prisoners who escaped from the John Connally Unit near Kenedy, Texas on December 13, 2000.

They were apprehended January 21-23, 2001 as a direct result of the television show America’s Most Wanted. On December 13, 2000, the seven carried out an elaborate scheme and escaped from the John B. Connally Unit, a maximum-security state prison near the South Texas town of Kenedy. Using several well-planned ploys, the seven convicts overpowered and restrained nine civilian maintenance supervisors, four correctional officers and three uninvolved inmates at approximately 11:20 a.m. The escape occurred during the slowest period of the day when there would be less surveillance of certain locations like the maintenance area — during lunch and at count time. Most of these plans involved one of the offenders calling someone over, while another hit the unsuspecting person on the head from behind. Once the victim was subdued, the offenders would remove some of his clothing, tie him up, gag him and place him in an electrical room behind a locked door. Eleven prison workers and three uninvolved inmates were bound and gagged. The attackers stole clothing, credit cards, and identification from their victims.

The group also impersonated prison officers on the phone and created false stories to ward off suspicion from authorities. They eventually made their way to the prison maintenance pickup-truck which they used to escape from the prison grounds. The remaining 5 living members of the group are all on death row awaiting death by lethal injection. Of the other two, one committed suicide and one has already been executed. [ Wikipedia ] 7 Alfréd Wetzler Wetzler was a Slovak Jew, and one of a very small number of Jews known to have escaped from the Auschwitz death camp during the Holocaust. Wetzler is known for the report that he and his fellow escapee, Rudolf Vrba, compiled about the inner workings of the Auschwitz camp – a ground plan of the camp, construction details of the gas chambers, crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Zyklon gas. The 32-page Vrba-Wetzler report, as it became known, was the first detailed report about Auschwitz to reach the West that the Allies regarded as credible. The evidence eventually led to the bombing of several government buildings in Hungary, killing Nazi officials who were instrumental in the railway deportations of Jews to Auschwitz.

The deportations halted, saving up to 120,000 Hungarian Jews. Wetzler escaped with a fellow Jew named Rudolf Vrba. With the help of the camp underground, at 2 p.m. on Friday, April 7, 1944 — the eve of Passover — the two men climbed inside a hollowed-out hiding place in a wood pile that was being stored to build the “Mexico” section for the new arrivals. It was outside Birkenau’s barbed-wire inner perimeter, but inside an external perimeter the guards kept erected during the day. The other prisoners placed boards around the hollowed-out area to hide the men, then sprinkled the area with pungent Russian tobacco soaked in gasoline to fool the guards’ dogs. The two remained in hiding for 4 nights – to avoid recapture. On April 10, wearing Dutch suits, overcoats, and boots they had taken from the camp, they made their way south, walking parallel to the So?a river, heading for the Polish border with Slovakia 80 miles (133 km.) away, guiding themselves using a page from a child’s atlas that Vrba had found in the warehouse.

You can read their report on Auschwitz here . [ Wikipedia ] 6 S?awomir Rawicz Rawicz was a Polish soldier who was arrested by Soviet occupation troops after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. When the Soviet Union and Germany took over Poland, Rawicz returned to Pi?sk where NKVD arrested him on November 19, 1939. He was taken to Moscow. He was first sent to Kharkov for interrogation, and then after trial he was sent to the Lubyanka prison in Moscow. He claims to have successfully resisted all attempts to torture a confession out of him in prison. He was sentenced, ostensibly for spying, to 25 years of hard labor in a Siberian prison camp. He was transported, alongside thousands of others, to Irkutsk and made to walk to Camp 303, 650 km south of the Arctic Circle, to build the camp from the ground up. On 9 April 1941, Rawicz claimed that he and his six allies escaped in a middle of a blizzard. They rushed to the south, avoiding towns in fear they would be betrayed, but apparently they were not actively pursued.

They also met an additional fugitive, Polish woman Krystyna. Nine days later they crossed the Lena River. They walked around Lake Baikal and crossed to Mongolia. Fortunately, people they encountered were friendly and hospitable. During the crossing of the Gobi desert, two of the group (Krystyna and Makowski) died. Others had to eat snakes to survive. Around October 1941 they claim to have reached Tibet. Locals were friendly, especially when men said they were trying to reach Lhasa. They crossed the Himalayas somehow in the middle of winter. Another of the group died in his sleep in the cold and one fell into a crevasse and disappeared. Rawicz claims the survivors reached India around March 1942. [ Wikipedia ] 5 Escape From Alcatraz In its 29 years of operation, there were 14 attempts to escape from Alcatraz prison involving 34 inmates. Officially, every escape attempt failed, and most participants were either killed or quickly re-captured. However, the participants in the 1937 and 1962 attempts, though presumed dead, disappeared without a trace, giving rise to popular theories that they were successful.

The most famous and intricate attempt to escape from Alcatraz (June 11, 1962) saw Frank Morris, and the Anglin brothers burrow out of their cells, climb to the top of the cell block, cut through bars to make it to the roof via an air vent. From there they climbed down a drain pipe, over a chain link fence and then to the shore where they assembled a pontoon-type raft and then vanished. The trio are believed to have drowned in the San Francisco Bay and are officially listed as missing and presumed drowned. However, they may have made it and gone to a place where people did not know them. [ Wikipedia ] 4 Libby Prison Escape The Libby Prison Escape was one of the most famous (and successful) prison breaks during the American Civil War. Overnight between February 9 and 10, 1864, more than 100 imprisoned Union soldiers broke out of their prisoner of war building at Libby Prison in Richmond, Virginia. Of the 109 escapees, 59 succeeded in reaching Union lines, 48 were recaptured, and 2 drowned in the nearby James River.

Libby Prison encompassed an entire city block in Richmond. To the north lay Carey Street, connecting the prison area to the rest of the city. On the south side ran the James River. The prison itself stood three stories above ground with a basement exposed on the river side. Living conditions were extremely bad; the food, sometimes lacking altogether, was poor and sanitation practically nonexistent. Thousands died there. The prisoners managed to break in to the basement area known as “rat hell” which was no longer used due to rat infestations, and dig a tunnel. After 17 days of digging, they succeeded in breaking through to a 50-foot vacant lot on the eastern side of the prison, resurfacing beneath a tobacco shed inside the grounds of the nearby Kerr’s Warehouse. When Col. Rose finally broke through to the other side, he told his men that the “Underground Railroad to God’s Country was open!” The officers escaped the prison in groups of two and three on the night of February 9, 1864. Once within the tobacco shed, the men collected inside the walled warehouse yard and simply strolled out the front gate.

The tunnel provided enough distance from the prison to stealthily subvert those jurisdictional lines and allow prisoners to slip into the dark streets unchallenged. [ Wikipedia ] 3 Pascal Payet There can be no doubt that this man deserves a place on this list – he has escaped not once, but twice from high security prisons in France – each time via hijacked helicopter! He also helped organize the escape of three other prisoners – again with a helicopter. Payet was initially sentenced to a 30 year jail term for a murder committed during the robbery of a security van. After his first escape (in 2001) he was captured and given seven more years for his role in the 2003 escape. He then escaped from Grasse prison using a helicopter that was hijacked by four masked men from Cannes-Mandelieu airport. The helicopter landed some time later at Brignoles, 38 kilometres north-east of Toulon, France on the Mediterranean coast. Payet and his accomplices then fled the scene and the pilot was released unharmed. Payet was re-captured on September 21, 2007, in Mataró, Spain, about 18 miles northeast of Barcelona.

He had undergone cosmetic surgery, but was still identified by Spanish police. [ Wikipedia ] 2 The Great Escape Stalag Luft III was a German Air Force prisoner-of-war camp during World War II that housed captured air force personnel. In January 1943, Roger Bushell led a plot for a major escape from the camp. The plan was to dig three deep tunnels, codenamed “Tom,” “Dick,” and “Harry.” Each of the tunnel entrances was carefully selected to ensure they were undetectable by the camp guards. In order to keep the tunnels from being detected by the perimeter microphones, they were very deep — about 9 metres (30 ft) below the surface. The tunnels were very small, only two feet square (about 0.37 m²), though larger chambers were dug to house the air pump, a workshop, and staging posts along each tunnel. The sandy walls of the tunnels were shored up with pieces of wood scavenged from all over the camp. As the tunnels grew longer, a number of technical innovations made the job easier and safer. One important issue was ensuring that the person digging had enough oxygen to breathe and keep his lamps lit.

A pump was built to push fresh air along the ducting into the tunnels. Later, electric lighting was installed and hooked into the camp’s electrical grid. The tunnellers also installed small rail car systems for moving sand more quickly, much like the systems used in old mining operations. The rails were key to moving 130 tons of material in a five-month period; they also reduced the time taken for tunnellers to reach the digging faces. “Harry” was finally ready in March 1944, but by that time the American prisoners, some of whom had worked extremely hard in all the effort to dig the tunnels, were moved to another compound. The prisoners had to wait about a week for a moonless night so that they could leave under the cover of complete darkness. Finally, on Friday, March 24, the escape attempt began. Unfortunately for the prisoners, the tunnel had come up short. It had been planned that the tunnel would reach into a nearby forest, but the first man out emerged just short of the tree line. Despite this, 76 men crawled through the tunnel to initial freedom, even through an air raid during which the camp’s (and the tunnel’s) electric lights were shut off.

Finally, at 5 AM on March 25, the 77th man was seen emerging from the tunnel by one of the guards. Out of the 76 men only 3 evaded capture. Fifty men were killed and the rest were captured and sent back. [ Wikipedia ] 1 Colditz Escape Colditz was one of the most famous German Army prisoner-of-war camps for officers in World War II. The camp was located in Colditz Castle, situated on a cliff overlooking the town of Colditz in Saxony. There were numerous successful attempts at escaping Colditz, but one in particular is the most interesting. In one of the most ambitious escape attempts from Colditz, the idea of building a glider was dreamt up by two British pilots, Jack Best and Bill Goldfinch, who had been sent to Colditz after escaping from another POW camp. The plan was to construct a two-man glider part by part. The glider was assembled by Bill Goldfinch and Jack Best in the lower attic above the chapel, and was to be launched from the roof in order to fly across the river Mulde, which was about 200 feet (60 m) below.

The officers who took part in the project built a false wall, to hide the secret space in the attic where they slowly built the glider out of stolen pieces of wood. Since the Germans were accustomed to looking down for tunnels, not up for secret workshops, they felt rather safe from detection. Hundreds of ribs had to be constructed, predominantly formed from bed slats, but also from every other piece of wood the POW’s could surreptitiously obtain. The wing spars were constructed from floor boards. Control wires were made from electrical wiring in unused portions of the castle. A glider expert, Lorne Welch, was asked to review the stress diagrams and calculations made by Goldfinch. Although the Colditz Cock never flew in real life, a replica of the Colditz glider was built for the 2000 Channel 4 “Escape from Colditz” documentary, and was flown successfully by John Lee on its first attempt at RAF Odiham with Best and Goldfinch in tearful attendance. While Best and Goldfinch did not escape Colditz (the camp was relieved by the allies just as the glider was nearing completion), they certainly had the most interesting and innovative method for executing it.

[ Wikipedia ] Learn and talk about Maze Prison escape, 1983 crimes in the United Kingdom, 1983 in Northern Ireland, 20th century in County Antrim, Escapees from British detention 6 References Previous IRA escapes[ edit ] During the Troubles , Irish republican prisoners had escaped from custody en masse on several occasions. On 17 November 1971, nine prisoners dubbed the "Crumlin Kangaroos" escaped from Crumlin Road Jail when rope ladders were thrown over the wall. Two prisoners were recaptured, but the remaining seven managed to cross the border into the Republic of Ireland and appeared at a press conference in Dublin . [1] On 17 January 1972, seven internees escaped from the prison ship HMS Maidstone by swimming to freedom, resulting in them being dubbed the "Magnificent Seven". [1] [2] On 31 October 1973, three leading IRA members, including former Chief of Staff Seamus Twomey , escaped from Mountjoy Prison in Dublin when a hijacked helicopter landed in the exercise yard of the prison.

Irish band The Wolfe Tones wrote a song celebrating the escape called The Helicopter Song , which topped the Irish popular music charts. [3] [4] [5] 19 IRA members escaped from Portlaoise Jail on 18 August 1974 after overpowering guards and using gelignite to blast through gates, [6] and 33 prisoners attempted to escape from Long Kesh on 6 November 1974 after digging a tunnel. IRA member Hugh Coney was shot dead by a sentry, 29 other prisoners were captured within a few yards of the prison, and the remaining three were back in custody within 24 hours. [5] [7] In March 1975, ten prisoners escaped from the courthouse in Newry while on trial for attempting to escape from Long Kesh. [5] The escapees included Larry Marley , who would later be one of the masterminds behind the 1983 escape.

(Marley was shot dead by loyalists in 1987.) [8] [9] On 10 June 1981, eight IRA members on remand , including Angelo Fusco , Paul Magee and Joe Doherty , escaped from Crumlin Road Jail. The prisoners took prison officers hostage using three handguns that had been smuggled into the prison, took their uniforms and shot their way out of the prison. [10] 1983 escape[ edit ] HM Prison Maze was considered one of the most escape-proof prisons in Europe. In addition to 15-foot (4.6 m) fences, each H-Block was encompassed by an 18-foot (5.5 m) concrete wall topped with barbed wire , and all gates on the complex were made of solid steel and electronically operated. [11] Prisoners had been planning the escape for several months. Bobby Storey and Gerry Kelly had started working as orderlies in H7, which allowed them to identify weaknesses in the security systems, and six handguns had been smuggled into the prison.

[8] Shortly after 2:30 pm on 25 September, prisoners seized control of H7 by simultaneously taking the prison officers hostage at gunpoint in order to prevent them from triggering an alarm. One officer was stabbed with a craft knife , and another was knocked down by a blow to the back of the head. One officer who attempted to prevent the escape was shot in the head by Gerry Kelly, but survived. [8] [12] By 2:50 pm the prisoners were in control of H7 without an alarm being raised. A dozen prisoners also took uniforms from the officers, and the officers were also forced to hand over their car keys and details of where their cars were, for possible later use during the escape. [12] A rearguard was left behind to watch over hostages and keep the alarm from being raised until they believed the escapees were clear of the prison, when they returned to their cells. At 3:25 pm, a lorry delivering food supplies arrived at the entrance to H7, whereupon Brendan McFarlane and other prisoners took the occupants hostage at gunpoint and took them inside H7.

The lorry driver was told the lorry was being used in the escape, and he was instructed what route to take and how to react if challenged. [12] Storey told the driver, "This man [Gerry Kelly] is doing 30 years and he will shoot you without hesitation if he has to. He has nothing to lose." [8] At 3:50 pm the prisoners left H7, and the driver and a prison orderly were taken back to the lorry, and the driver's foot tied to the clutch . 37 prisoners climbed into the back of the lorry, while Kelly lay on the floor of the cab with a gun pointed at the driver, who was also told the cab had been booby trapped with a hand grenade . [12] At nearly 4:00 pm the lorry drove towards the main gate of the prison, where the prisoners intended to take over the gatehouse. Ten prisoners dressed in guards' uniforms and armed with guns and chisels dismounted from the lorry and entered the gatehouse, where they took the officers hostage. [12] At 4:05 pm the officers began to resist, and an officer pressed an alarm button.

When other staff responded via an intercom, a senior officer said while being held at gunpoint that the alarm had been triggered accidentally. By this time the prisoners were struggling to maintain control in the gatehouse due to the number of hostages. [12] Officers arriving for work were entering the gatehouse from outside the prison, and each was ordered at gunpoint to join the other hostages. Officer James Ferris ran from the gatehouse towards the pedestrian gate attempting to raise the alarm, pursued by Dermot Finucane. Ferris had already been stabbed three times in the chest, and before he could raise the alarm he collapsed. [12] Map of HM Prison Maze showing the escape route Finucane continued to the pedestrian gate where he stabbed the officer controlling the gate, and two officers who had just entered the prison. This incident was seen by a soldier on duty in a watch tower, who reported to the British Army operations room that he had seen prison officers fighting. The operations room telephoned the prison's Emergency Control Room (ECR), which replied that everything was all right and that an alarm had been accidentally triggered earlier.

[12] At 4:12 pm the alarm was raised when an officer in the gatehouse pushed the prisoner holding him hostage out of the room and telephoned the ECR. However, this was not done soon enough to prevent the escape. After several attempts the prisoners had opened the main gate, and were waiting for the prisoners still in the gatehouse to rejoin them in the lorry. At this time two prison officers blocked the exit with their cars, forcing the prisoners to abandon the lorry and make their way to the outer fence which was 25 yards away. [12] Four prisoners attacked one of the officers and hijacked his car, which they drove towards the external gate. They crashed into a car near the gate and abandoned the car. Two escaped through the gate, one was captured exiting the car, and another was captured after being chased by a soldier. [12] At the main gate, a prison officer was shot in the leg while chasing the only two prisoners who had not yet reached the outer fence. The prisoner who fired the shot was captured after being shot and wounded by a soldier in a watch tower, and the other prisoner was captured after falling.

The other prisoners escaped over the fence, and by 4:18 pm the main gate was closed and the prison secured, after 35 prisoners had breached the prison perimeter. [12] The escape was the biggest in both British and Irish history, and the biggest in Europe since World War II . [11] [13] Outside the prison the IRA had planned a logistical support operation involving 100 armed members, [14] but due to a miscalculation of five minutes the prisoners found no transport waiting for them and were forced to flee across fields or hijack vehicles. [8] [15] The British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary immediately activated a contingency plan and by 4:25 pm a cordon of vehicle check points were in place around the prison, and others were later in place in strategic positions across Northern Ireland, resulting in the recapture of one prisoner at 11:00 pm. Twenty prison officers were injured during the escape, thirteen were kicked and beaten, four stabbed, and two shot. One prison warder, James Ferris, who had been stabbed, died after suffering a heart attack during the escape.

[8] [12] Reaction[ edit ] The escape was a propaganda coup and morale boost for the IRA, with Irish republicans dubbing it the "Great Escape". [8] [11] Leading unionist politician Ian Paisley called on Nicholas Scott , the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, to resign. The British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made a statement in Ottawa during a visit to Canada, saying "It is the gravest [breakout] in our present history, and there must be a very deep inquiry". [11] The day after the escape, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland James Prior announced an inquiry would be headed by Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons , James Hennessy. [11] [16] The Hennessy Report was published on 26 January 1984 placing most of the blame for the escape on prison staff, and made a series of recommendations to improve security at the prison. [12] [17] The report also placed blame with the designers of the prison, the Northern Ireland Office and successive prison governors who had failed to improve security.

[12] Prior announced that the prison's governor had resigned, and that there would be no ministerial resignations as a result of the report's findings. [17] [18] Four days after the Hennessy Report was published, then Minister for Prisons Nicholas Scott dismissed allegations from the Prison Governors Association and the Prison Officers Association that the escape was due to political interference in the running of the prison. [17] On 25 October 1984, nineteen prisoners appeared in court on charges relating to the death of prison officer James Ferris, sixteen charged with his murder. [8] [17] A pathologist determined that the stab wounds Ferris suffered would not have killed a healthy man. The judge acquitted all sixteen as he could not correlate the stabbing to the heart attack. [8] Escapees[ edit ] Fifteen escapees were captured on the day, including four who were discovered hiding underwater in a river near the prison using reeds to breathe. [11] [15] Four more escapees were captured over the next two days, including Hugh Corey and Patrick McIntyre who were captured following a two-hour siege at an isolated farmhouse.

[11] Out of the remaining 19 escapees, 18 ended up in the republican stronghold of South Armagh where two members of the IRA's South Armagh Brigade were in charge of transporting them to safehouses , [19] and given the option of either returning to active service in the IRA's armed campaign or a job and new identity in the United States. [20] Escapee Kieran Fleming drowned in the Bannagh River near Kesh in December 1984, while attempting to escape from an ambush by the Special Air Service (SAS) in which fellow IRA member Antoine Mac Giolla Bhrighde was killed. [21] Gerard McDonnell was captured in Glasgow in June 1985 along with four other IRA members, including Brighton bomber Patrick Magee , and convicted of conspiring to cause sixteen explosions across England.

[22] Séamus McElwaine was killed by the SAS in Roslea in April 1986, [23] and Kelly and McFarlane were returned to prison in December 1986 after being extradited from the Netherlands where they had been arrested in January 1986, leaving twelve escapees still on the run. [24] Pádraig McKearney was killed by the SAS along with seven other members of the IRA's East Tyrone Brigade in Loughgall in May 1987, the IRA's biggest single loss of life since the 1920s. [25] In November 1987 Paul Kane and one of the masterminds of the escape, Dermot Finucane [15] – a brother of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane , who would be shot dead by the legal Ulster Defence Association in 1989 – were arrested in Granard , County Longford on extradition warrants issued by the British authorities.

[26] Robert Russell was extradited back to Northern Ireland in August 1988 after being captured in Dublin in 1984, [27] [28] and Paul Kane followed in April 1989. [29] In March 1990 the Supreme Court of Ireland in Dublin blocked the extradition of James Pius Clarke and Dermot Finucane on the grounds they "would be probable targets for ill-treatment by prison staff" if they were returned to prison in Northern Ireland. [30] [31] Kevin Barry Artt, Pól Brennan, James Smyth and Terrence Kirby, collectively known as the "H-Block 4", were arrested in the United States between 1992 and 1994 and fought lengthy legal battles against extradition. [32] [33] Smyth was extradited back to Northern Ireland in 1996 and returned to prison, before being released in 1998. [33] Pól Brennan, who had married a US citizen, was detained and removed from the United States to the Republic of Ireland on either 20 or 21 August 2009.

[34] [34] [35] [36] Tony Kelly[ who? ] was arrested in Letterkenny , County Donegal in October 1997 but was not extradited. [37] In 2000 the British government announced that the extradition requests for Brennan, Artt and Kirby were being withdrawn as part of the Good Friday Agreement. The men officially remain fugitives, but in 2003 Her Majesty's Prison Service said they were not being "actively pursued". [38] Dermot McNally, who had been living in the Republic of Ireland and was tracked down in 1996, [33] and Dermot Finucane, received an amnesty in January 2002, allowing them to return to Northern Ireland if they wished to. [39] However, Tony McAllister was not granted a similar amnesty.[ clarification needed ][ why? ] [40] As of 2008, two escapees, Gerard Fryers and Séamus Campbell, had not been traced since the escape.

[41] [42] Up to 800 republicans held a party at a hotel in Letterkenny in September 2003 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the escape, which was described by Ulster Unionist Party MP Jeffrey Donaldson as "insensitive, inappropriate and totally unnecessary". [38] [43] Subsequent escape attempts[ edit ] On 10 August 1984 loyalist prisoner Benjamin Redfern, a member of the Ulster Defence Association , attempted to escape from HM Prison Maze by hiding in the back of a refuse lorry , but died after being caught in the crushing mechanism. [44] [45] On 7 July 1991, IRA prisoners Nessan Quinlivan and Pearse McAuley escaped from HM Prison Brixton , where they were being held on remand. They escaped using a gun that had been smuggled into the prison, wounding a motorist as they fled. [46] [47] On 9 September 1994 six prisoners including an armed robber, Danny McNamee and four IRA members including Paul Magee , escaped from HM Prison Whitemoor .

[48] The prisoners, in possession of two guns that had been smuggled into the prison, scaled the prison walls using knotted sheets. [48] [49] A guard was shot and wounded during the escape, and the prisoners were captured after being chased across fields by guards and the police. [49] In March 1997 a 40-foot (12 m) tunnel was discovered in H7 at the Maze Prison. The tunnel was fitted with electric lights, and was 80 feet (24 m) from the outside wall, having already breached the block's perimeter wall. [50] On 10 December 1997 IRA prisoner Liam Averill, serving a life sentence after being convicted of the murder of two Protestants, escaped from the Maze dressed as a woman. [50] Averill mingled with a group of prisoners' families attending a Christmas party, and escaped on the coach taking the families out of the prison. He was never apprehended. [50] [51] 1983 Maze Prison Escape | Prison Documentaries - YouTube 1983 Maze Prison Escape | Prison Documentaries Want to watch this again later?

Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. The interactive transcript could not be loaded. Loading... Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Feb 9, 2016 The Maze Prison escape (known to Irish republicans as the Great Escape) took place on 25 September 1983 in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. HM Prison Maze (also known as Long Kesh) was a maximum security prison considered to be one of the most escape-proof prisons in Europe, and held prisoners convicted of taking part in armed paramilitary campaigns during the Troubles. In the biggest prison escape in British history, 38 Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoner escaped from H-Block 7 (H7) of the prison. One prison officer died of a heart attack as a result of the escape and twenty others were injured, including two who were shot with guns that had been smuggled into the prison. The escape was a propaganda coup for the IRA, and a British government minister faced calls to resign.

The official inquiry into the escape placed most of the blame onto prison staff, who in turn blamed the escape on political interference in the running of the prison. Category 8 Remarkable Prison Breaks - History Lists History Lists October 7, 2015 By Elizabeth Nix Share this: Google As long as there have been prisons, people have been trying to break out of them. From the infamous 1962 escape from Alcatraz with raincoats to the nobleman who fled the Tower of London in drag, get the stories behind eight notable prison breaks. The inmates who fled The Rock in a raft made from raincoats Alcatraz. (Credit: khr128/iStockphoto.com) From 1934 to 1963, the U.S. penitentiary on Alcatraz Island in the middle of San Francisco Bay housed some of America’s most notorious criminals, including Al Capone, George “Machine Gun” Kelly and James “Whitey” Bulger.

During its 29 years as a federal prison, approximately 1,545 men did time at the maximum-security facility, nicknamed The Rock, and there were 14 different escape attempts involving 36 inmates. The most celebrated escape attempt took place in June 1962, when three prisoners fled the island on a raft constructed from raincoats. In the months leading up to their daring escape, the men had used homemade tools to slowly widen the ventilation holes in the walls of their cells, which they crawled through on the night they vanished. In their beds, they left lifelike dummy heads they’d devised as decoys. Despite a lengthy, large-scale manhunt, the fugitives never were heard from again and authorities believe they likely drowned in the San Francisco Bay’s strong, cold currents. Clint Eastwood starred in a 1979 movie about the breakout, fittingly titled “Escape from Alcatraz.” Of all the prisoners who attempted to flee Alcatraz, 23 were captured, six were shot and killed while trying to escape and two drowned. An additional five (including the three who broke out in 1962) remain unaccounted for and are presumed drowned.

The Union POWs who tunneled out of a Confederate prison Libby Prison in April 1865. (Credit: Alexander Gardner) On February 9, 1864, 109 Union officers tunneled their way out of Libby Prison, a bleak, Confederate prisoner-of-war facility in Richmond, Virginia. After opening in March 1962, the prison, situated in a former tobacco warehouse, quickly became an overcrowded, disease-ridden place where prisoners were subjected to severe food shortages. Starting in the fall of 1863, a small group of inmates made three failed attempts to dig tunnels out of the prison. With rats crawling over them as they labored in secret, the men finally managed to dig a fourth tunnel—measuring 50 feet long and ranging in width from 36 to 16 inches—that they used to escape. Fifty-nine of the men eventually reached Union territory, while 48 were recaptured and two drowned. Following the Libby Prison escape, Confederate officials transferred most of the prisoners there to other sites, including the notorious POW camp at Andersonville, Georgia.

Britain’s Biggest Prison Break A watchtower and perimeter wall marks the boundary of the former Maze Prison, west of Belfast in Northern Ireland. (Credit: Paul Mcerlane/Getty Images) The largest prison escape in British history took place on September 25, 1983, when 38 inmates, all of them members of the Irish Republican Army, broke out of Her Majesty’s Prison Maze near Belfast, Northern Ireland. Opened in 1971, the maximum-security facility housed a number of men convicted of crimes linked to the Troubles, the conflict between unionists who wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom and republicans who favored the unification of Ireland. In 1981, a group of Irish republicans at Maze Prison launched a hunger strike; 10 died, including their leader, Bobby Sands. The 1983 escape occurred after inmates, armed with smuggled guns and knives, overpowered guards and hijacked a truck delivering food to the prison. Prison officers tried to block the vehicle from getting past the gate, forcing the escapees to jump from the back of the vehicle and run.

One guard was stabbed during the escape and died of a heart attack, while nearly two dozen other prison officers were injured. Within a few days, 19 of the men were caught (three others never made it off the prison grounds) but the others got away. Several of the men eventually made it to the United States. The Maze prison was closed in 2000 as part of the 1998 Good Friday peace accord. The notorious drug kingpin who escaped–twice Drug trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman is escorted to a helicopter by Mexican security forces. (Credit: Susana Gonzalez/Getty Images) On February 22, 2014, one of the world’s most-wanted criminals, drug trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” (“Shorty”) Guzman Loera, was arrested after outrunning law enforcement for more than a decade. Guzman, a third-grade dropout, was first arrested in 1993 and sentenced to 20 years behind bars for murder. While locked up in a high-security prison in the Mexican state of Jalisco, he paid off the staff and continued to run his criminal enterprise.

In 2001, he escaped the facility; some accounts claim Guzman was wheeled out in a laundry cart, while other sources suggest prison officials simply let him walk out. For years afterward he used violence, bribery and a large network of informants to help him remain a fugitive. His cartel grew into the largest supplier of illegal narcotics to America, and the U.S. government offered a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest. On February 22, 2014, law enforcement agents finally tracked down the drug kingpin to an apartment in Mazatlán, Mexico, and arrested him. However, on July 11, 2015, Guzman, then incarcerated at the nation’s highest-security penitentiary, Altiplano, approximately 55 miles west of Mexico City, once again escaped, this time via a hole in the floor of his cell and out through a mile-long tunnel that had been secretly dug and equipped with lights and ventilation. Since then, he’s continued to elude authorities. The famous gangster who got out of jail with a fake gun Portrait of American criminal gang leader and bank robber John Dillinger.

(Credit: American Stock/Getty Images) After spending most of his 20s in state prison for attempting to hold up a small-town Indiana grocer, John Dillinger was paroled in May 1933 and went on to pull off a string of bank robberies that turned him into one of America’s most-wanted gangsters. In September 1933, he was arrested in connection with a bank heist and jailed in Lima, Ohio. The following month, several of Dillinger’s criminal associates showed up at the Lima jail and posed as law enforcement officials, informing the sheriff they wanted to see Dillinger. When the sheriff asked to look at the men’s badges, they killed him then sprung Dillinger from his cell. In January 1934, while Dillinger and some accomplices were holding up a bank in East Chicago, Indiana, a police officer was shot and killed. Dillinger was apprehended later that month in Tucson, Arizona. Afterward, he was extradited to Indiana to stand trial for the East Chicago murder and held at the county jail in Crown Point, a facility authorities had bragged was escape-proof.

However, on March 3, 1934, Dillinger, armed with a fake gun (either smuggled in by his attorney or made by Dillinger himself), forced guards to release him, stole a sheriff’s car and escaped. That July, FBI agents finally caught up with the 31-year-old gangster and shot him dead as he was leaving a movie theater in Chicago. The nobleman who fled the Tower of London in drag Tower of London viewed from the River Thames. (Credit: Bob Collowan) After joining the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, Catholic nobleman William Maxwell, 5th Earl of Nithsdale, was locked up in the Tower of London, found guilty of treason and sentenced to die. Shortly before she believed her husband was to be executed, Lady Nithsdale went to visit him in prison in 1716, accompanied by her maid and several female friends. The group smuggled in women’s clothing for the earl then spirited him out of the Tower of London disguised as a member of the fairer sex. The earl fled England, this time masquerading as a servant to a Venetian ambassador, and ended up in Rome.

Lady Nithsdale’s own life was in danger once her involvement in the earl’s escape was suspected, but she managed to flee Britain separately and meet her husband in Rome, where they resided in exile. The serial killer who went on the lam in the Rockies FBI wanted poster for Ted Bundy. (Credit: Universal History Archive/Getty Images) In 1976, law school dropout Ted Bundy began serving time in a Utah prison for a kidnapping conviction. The following year, he was extradited to Aspen, Colorado, to stand trial for the 1975 murder of a nurse. During a recess at a courthouse hearing in June 1977, Bundy, who was acting as his own attorney, asked to use the court’s law library. Left alone there, he jumped out of a second-floor window then fled up Aspen Mountain. During the six days he was on the lam, Bundy got lost, stole a car and returned to Aspen, where he was caught by police. He was returned to the county jail in Glenwood Springs, 40 miles away.

In December, after losing weight, Bundy was able to squeeze through a hole made for a light fixture in the ceiling of his cell, move through a crawl space, drop down into a jail keeper’s apartment and walk out the front door. From there, he made his way to Florida, where he murdered two female Florida State University students and a 12-year-old girl. Bundy was apprehended by police in Pensacola on February 15, 1978. Before he was put to death in the electric chair in 1989 at age 42, Bundy confessed to 30 murders around the U.S.; some experts have suggested the actual number might be higher. The WWII Prison Escape That Almost Took Flight Colditz Castle. (Credit: Michael DeFreitas/Getty Images) During World War II, Colditz Castle, an ancient fortress in eastern Germany, was converted into a high-security POW camp. Many of the men incarcerated in the castle, officially known during the war as Oflag IV-C, had been sent there because they’d previously escaped, or attempted to escape, from other POW camps.

A number of prisoners tried to break out of Colditz, some of them successfully; those who were caught typically were punished with a stint in solitary confinement. However, after the Nazis executed 50 POWs who’d tried to flee Stalag Luft III in March 1944 (an event that came to be referred to as the Great Escape), British military intelligence warned against further prison breaks. That didn’t stop a small group of men at Colditz from working on a unique escape plan: the construction of a glider plane. The group, which included British pilots Bill Goldfinch and Jack Best, along with Tony Rolt, a former race car driver, worked in a hidden space in an attic and built the two-person glider using stolen pieces of wood and electrical cable. The men intended to launch the glider, dubbed the Colditz Cock, from the castle roof. Before that happened, though, Colditz was liberated by the Allies in April 1945. In 2000, a full-size replica of the Colditz Cock was constructed based on Goldfinch’s original specifications and flown at a Royal Air Force station in England, with Goldfinch, Best and other veterans in attendance.

Tags Top Escape Artists You've Never Heard Of Breakout Community User This post was created by a user and has not been vetted or endorsed by BuzzFeed's editorial staff. BuzzFeed Community is a place where anyone can post awesome lists and creations. Learn more or post your buzz! 1. Antonio Ferrara Five years into his prison career, six heavily armed men drove up to the front gate of Fresnes Prison impersonating officers, and freed Ferrara. He was only on the lam for four months before being recaptured. ( via ) 2. Bobby Storey and Gerry Kelly Storey and Kelly led the biggest prison escape in British history in September 1983 at Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. 38 Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners escaped and held guards and an entire cellblock hostage until forcing a supply truck to drive them to hiding. Only 19 of the 38 were ever caught. ( via ) 3. Pascal Payet Payet escaped twice from high security prisons in France via hijacked helicopter. And upon his second escape, he hid out near Barcelona and underwent plastic surgery to evade police. ( via ) 4.

Jay Junior Sigler Jay’s mom, Sandra Sigler, drove an industrial sized truck through three prison barricades. Once through, Jay was passed a shotgun, which he fired at guards as they retreated. After switching cars outside of town, the crew were eventually captured at a nearby gas station. ( via ) 5. Bill Goldfinch and Jack Best This one only sort of counts since the Colditz POW camp was relieved before Best and Goldfinch could escape, however their plan was to construct a two-person glider to fly over the river from a prison tower. It was almost 100% complete when they were freed. ( via ) Dinge en Goete (Things and Stuff): This Day in History: Sep 25, 1983: The Maze Prison escape (known to Irish republicans as the Great Escape) 1983 escape HM Prison Maze was considered one of the most escape-proof prisons in Europe. In addition to 15-foot (4.6 m) fences, each H-Block was encompassed by an 18-foot (5.5 m) concrete wall topped with barbed wire , and all gates on the complex were made of solid steel and electronically operated.

[11] Prisoners had been planning the escape for several months. Bobby Storey and Gerry Kelly had started working as orderlies in H7, which allowed them to identify weaknesses in the security systems, and six handguns had been smuggled into the prison. [8] Shortly after 2:30 pm on 25 September, prisoners seized control of H7 by simultaneously taking the prison officers hostage at gunpoint in order to prevent them from triggering an alarm. One officer was stabbed with a craft knife , and another was knocked down by a blow to the back of the head. One officer who attempted to prevent the escape was shot in the head by Gerry Kelly, but survived. [8] [12] By 2:50 pm the prisoners were in total control of H7 without an alarm being raised. A dozen prisoners also took uniforms from the officers, and the officers were also forced to hand over their car keys and details of where their cars were, for possible later use during the escape. [12] A rear guard was left behind to watch over hostages and keep the alarm from being raised until they believed the escapees were clear of the prison, when they returned to their cells.

[12] At 3:25 pm, a lorry delivering food supplies arrived at the entrance to H7, where Brendan McFarlane and other prisoners took the occupants hostage at gunpoint and took them inside H7. The lorry driver was told the lorry was being used in the escape, and he was instructed what route to take and how to react if challenged. [12] Bobby Storey told the driver that "This man [Gerry Kelly] is doing 30 years and he will shoot you without hesitation if he has to. He has nothing to lose". [8] At 3:50 pm the prisoners left H7, and the driver and a prison orderly were taken back to the lorry, and the driver's foot tied to the clutch . 37 prisoners climbed into the back of the lorry, while Gerry Kelly lay on the floor of the cab with a gun pointed at the driver, who was also told the cab had been booby trapped with a hand grenade . [12] At nearly 4:00 pm the lorry drove towards the main gate of the prison, where the prisoners intended to take over the gatehouse.

Ten prisoners dressed in guards' uniforms and armed with guns and chisels dismounted from the lorry and entered the gatehouse, where they took the officers hostage. [12] At 4:05 pm the officers began to resist, and an officer pressed an alarm button. When other staff responded via an intercom, a senior officer said while being held at gunpoint that the alarm had been triggered accidentally. By this time the prisoners were struggling to maintain control in the gatehouse due to the number of hostages. [12] Officers arriving for work were entering the gatehouse from outside the prison, and each was ordered at gunpoint to join the other hostages. Officer James Ferris ran from the gatehouse towards the pedestrian gate attempting to raise the alarm, pursued by Dermot Finucane. Ferris had already been stabbed three times in the chest, and before he could raise the alarm he collapsed. [12] Finucane continued to the pedestrian gate where he stabbed the officer controlling the gate, and two officers who had just entered the prison. This incident was seen by a soldier on duty in a watch tower, who reported to the Army operations room that he had seen prison officers fighting.

The operations room telephoned the prison's Emergency Control Room (ECR), which replied that everything was all right and that an alarm had been accidentally triggered earlier. [12] At 4:12 pm the alarm was raised when an officer in the gatehouse pushed the prisoner holding him hostage out of the room and telephoned the ECR. However, this was not done soon enough to prevent the escape. After several attempts the prisoners had opened the main gate, and were waiting for the prisoners still in the gatehouse to rejoin them in the lorry. At this time two prison officers blocked the exit with their cars, forcing the prisoners to abandon the lorry and make their way to the outer fence which was 25 yards away. [12] Four prisoners attacked one of the officers and hijacked his car, which they drove towards the external gate. They crashed into a car near the gate and abandoned the car. Two escaped through the gate, one was captured exiting the car, and another was captured after being chased by a soldier. [12] At the main gate, a prison officer was shot in the leg while chasing the only two prisoners who had not yet reached the outer fence.

The prisoner who fired the shot was captured after being shot and wounded by a soldier in a watch tower, and the other prisoner was captured after falling. The other prisoners escaped over the fence, and by 4:18 pm the main gate was closed and the prison secured, after 35 prisoners had successfully breached the perimeter of the prison. [12] The escape was the biggest in British history, and the biggest in Europe since World War II . [11] [13] Outside the prison the IRA had planned a logistical support operation involving 100 armed members, [14] but due to a miscalculation of five minutes the prisoners found no transport waiting for them and were forced to flee across fields or hijack vehicles. [8] [15] The British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary immediately activated a contingency plan, and by 4:25 pm a cordon of vehicle check points were in place around the prison, and others were later in place in strategic positions across Northern Ireland, resulting in the recapture of one prisoner at 11:00 pm.

Twenty prison officers were injured during the escape, thirteen were kicked and beaten, four stabbed, two shot, and another, James Ferris, died after suffering a heart attack during the escape. [8] [12] Reaction The escape was a propaganda coup and morale boost for the IRA, with Irish republicans dubbing it the "Great Escape". [8] [11] Leading Unionist Ian Paisley called on Nicholas Scott , the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, to resign. The British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made a statement in Ottawa during a visit to Canada, saying "It is the gravest [breakout] in our present history, and there must be a very deep inquiry". [11] The day after the escape, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland James Prior announced an inquiry would be headed by Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons , James Hennessy. [11] [16] The Hennessy Report was published on 26 January 1984 placing most of the blame for the escape on prison staff, and made a series of recommendations to improve security at the prison.

[12] [17] The report also placed blame with the designers of the prison, the Northern Ireland Office and successive prison governors who had failed to improve security. [12] James Prior announced the prison's governor had resigned, and that there would be no ministerial resignations as a result of the report's findings. [17] [18] Four days after the Hennessy Report was published, then Minister for Prisons Nicholas Scott dismissed allegations from the Prison Governors Association and the Prison Officers Association that the escape was due to political interference in the running of the prison. [17] On 25 October 1984, nineteen prisoners appeared in court on charges relating to the death of prison officer James Ferris, sixteen of them charged with his murder. [8] [17] A pathologist stated that the stab wounds Ferris suffered would not have killed a healthy man. The judge acquitted all sixteen as he could not correlate the stabbing to the heart attack. [8] Escapees Fifteen escapees were captured on the first day, including four who were discovered hiding underwater in a river near the prison using reeds to breathe.

[11] [15] Four more escapees were captured over the next two days, including Hugh Corey and Patrick McIntyre who were captured following a two-hour siege at an isolated farmhouse. [11] Out of the remaining 19 escapees, 18 ended up in the republican stronghold of South Armagh where two members of the IRA's South Armagh Brigade were in charge of transporting them to safehouses , [19] and they were given the option of either returning to active service in the IRA's armed campaign or a job and new identity in the United States. [20] Escapee Kieran Fleming drowned in the Bannagh River near Kesh in December 1984, while attempting to escape from an ambush by the Special Air Service (SAS) in which fellow IRA member Antoine Mac Giolla Bhrighde was killed. [21] Gerard McDonnell was captured in Glasgow in June 1985 along with four other IRA members including Brighton bomber Patrick Magee , and convicted of conspiring to cause sixteen explosions across England.

[22] Séamus McElwaine was killed by the SAS in Roslea in April 1986, [23] and Gerry Kelly and Brendan McFarlane were returned to prison in December 1986 after being extradited from Amsterdam where they had been arrested in January 1986, leaving twelve escapees still on the run. [24] Pádraig McKearney was killed by the SAS along with seven other members of the IRA's East Tyrone Brigade in Loughgall in May 1987, the IRA's biggest single loss of life since the 1920s. [25] In November 1987 Paul Kane and the mastermind of the escape Dermot Finucane, [15] brother of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane who was later killed by loyalist paramilitaries in 1989, were arrested in Granard , County Longford on extradition warrants issued by the British authorities.

[26] Robert Russell was extradited back to Northern Ireland in August 1988 after being captured in Dublin in 1984, [27] [28] and Paul Kane followed in April 1989. [29] In March 1990 the Supreme Court of Ireland in Dublin blocked the extradition of James Pius Clarke and Dermot Finucane on the grounds they "would be probable targets for ill-treatment by prison staff" if they were returned to prison in Northern Ireland. [30] [31] Kevin Barry Artt, Pól Brennan, James Smyth and Terrence Kirby, collectively known as the "H-Block 4", were arrested in the United States between 1992 and 1994 and fought lengthy legal battles against extradition. [32] [33] Smyth was extradited back to Northern Ireland in 1996 and returned to prison, before being released in 1998 as part of the Good Friday Agreement . [33] Tony Kelly was arrested in Letterkenny , County Donegal in October 1997, [34] and fought successfully against extradition.

[35] In 2000 the British government announced that the extradition requests for Brennan, Artt and Kirby were being withdrawn as part of the Good Friday Agreement. [36] The men officially remain fugitives, but in 2003 the Prison Service said they were not being "actively pursued". [37] Dermot McNally, who had been living in the Republic of Ireland and was tracked down in 1996, [33] and Dermot Finucane received an amnesty in January 2002, allowing them to return to Northern Ireland if they wished to. [38] However Tony McAllister was not granted an amnesty which would have allowed him to return to his home in Ballymurphy . [39] As of September 2003 two escapees, Gerard Fryers and Séamus Campbell, had not been traced since the escape. [40] Up to 800 republicans held a party at a hotel in Donegal in September 2003 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the escape, which was described by Ulster Unionist Party MP Jeffrey Donaldson as "insensitive, inappropriate and totally unnecessary".

[37] Subsequent escape attempts On 10 August 1984 loyalist prisoner Benjamin Redfern, a member of the Ulster Defence Association , attempted to escape from HM Prison Maze by hiding in the back of a refuse lorry , but died after being caught in the crushing mechanism. [41] [42] On 7 July 1991 IRA prisoners Nessan Quinlivan and Pearse McAuley escaped from HM Prison Brixton , where they were being held on remand. They escaped using a gun that had been smuggled into the prison, wounding a motorist as they fled after escaping the prison. [43] [44] On 9 September 1994 six prisoners including an armed robber, Danny McNamee and four IRA members including Paul Magee , escaped from HM Prison Whitemoor . [45] The prisoners, in possession of two guns that had been smuggled into the prison, scaled the prison walls using knotted sheets. [45] [46] A guard was shot and wounded during the escape, and the prisoners were captured after being chased across fields by guards and the police.

[46] In March 1997 a 40-foot (12 m) tunnel was discovered in H7 at HM Prison Maze. The tunnel was fitted with electric lights, and was 80 feet (24 m) from the outside wall having already breached the block's perimeter wall. [47] On 10 December 1997 IRA prisoner Liam Averill, serving a life sentence after being convicted of the murder of two Protestants, escaped from HM Prison Maze dressed as a woman. [47] Averill mingled with a group of prisoners' families attending a Christmas party, and escaped on the coach taking the families out of the prison. [47] [48] Taken from: e [25.09.2013] References 1983 Maze Prison Escape | Full Documentary HD - YouTube 1983 Maze Prison Escape | Full Documentary HD Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. The interactive transcript could not be loaded. Loading... Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now.

Please try again later. Published on Aug 28, 2015 Prisons Documentaries The Maze Prison escape (known to Irish republicans as the Great Escape) took place on 25 September 1983 in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. HM Prison Maze (also known as Long Kesh) was a maximum security prison considered to be one of the most escape-proof prisons in Europe, and held prisoners convicted of taking part in armed paramilitary campaigns during the Troubles. In the biggest prison escape in British history, 38 Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoner escaped from H-Block 7 (H7) of the prison. One prison officer died of a heart attack as a result of the escape and twenty others were injured, including two who were shot with guns that had been smuggled into the prison. The escape was a propaganda coup for the IRA, and a British government minister faced calls to resign. The official inquiry into the escape placed most of the blame onto prison staff, who in turn blamed the escape on political interference in the running of the prison.

Question: In September 1983, 38 Irish Republican Army prisoners escaped from which prison in the largest prison escape in British history?
Answer: Maze Prison