Moroccan bloggers discuss prison break

2008-04-17

Moroccan bloggers were buzzing over the dramatic Kenitra prison escape earlier this month in which nine inmates dug a tunnel and fled the jail. Bloggers raised questions about prison security and outside help.

[Getty Images] Guards open a door in Kenitra prison, where nine terror convicts escaped on Monday (April 17th) by tunneling 22m from a cell toilet. The episode has shocked Maghreb bloggers.

The news last Monday (April 7th) of the escape of nine terrorists from a prison in Kenitra drew sharp reactions from many Moroccan bloggers.

Blogger Najlae wrote that the escape left her "speechless".

"I do not know the details," she continued, "[but] this episode reminds us of the escape of El Nene [a Moroccan drug baron], only here, it is nine people who had the equipment and the time to prepare for their escape at ease with no worries".

The prisoners, blogged Adilski, were all serving sentences for their role in suicide bombings in Casablanca in 2003. They escaped "spectacularly" through a tunnel they dug, and the "subsequent manhunt is still going on… there are some indications that help from inside might have played a big role in it," he wrote.

"The prison guards can be easily coerced because not only they are underpaid, but they also work in a very corrupt environment where only money and bribes rule. It's the culture of prisons in Morocco, just like it is the case with prisons in developing nations," he concluded.

One commenter using the name Maroc accused the administration. He wrote: "A corrupted body holds in it germs for its own destruction. Greed, perfidy and vanity have no limits in the spheres of the government. We can buy everything, even an escape!"

To blogger Jamal Hafsi, the Kenitra breakout sounded like a scene from some movie. "I don't know if Michael Scofield from the TV series Prison Break was the inspiration," he wrote, "but I'm starting to believe that this prison in Kenitra... is more like a set for escape movies than it is a prison."

Casting doubt on the possibility that "the takfirists …benefited from any inside help, like El Nene," the blogger ventured that the breakout owed mainly to lax prison oversight.