Spectacular prison break from an ex child prisoner

Jacqueline de Croÿ - 26 juillet 2009

A couple made a helicopter tour, this Thursday June 23, 2009. The woman wanted to fly over her work place: the hospital St John, she said, two minutes away from the prison of Bruges. The man opened his jacket and got a gun out. He asked the pilot to land in the prison yard. Several prisoners got close, three got in but it was impossible to take off with such a weight. The negotiation was short. Lahoucine El Haddouchi stayed. He is only 22. He "already made himself guilty of having made a hostage" said the spokesperson of the Minister for Justice, with a very personal notion of the presumption of innocence, before even a magistrate judged opportunity to accuse him. He is for the least, sentenced to 6 months high security, isolated 23 hours out of 24, only allowed to move with fists and feet shackled. But the "fair and human" justice provides that this is not enough.

Among the escaped prisoners: Ashraf Sekkaki, aged 26, imprisoned since 10 years; a kid from Mechelen, who has only known prison since he is 16. Only a magistrate can understand what justifies, maybe as from the start of stealing a hand bag, the imprisonment of a minor during 5 years, especially knowing that Marc Dutroux had been released after only 3 years, for 5 abductions and rapes of minors, within the framework of child pornography production. Ashraf Sekkaki did not understand. He escaped from the Turnhout prison in 2003, when he was 21.

There are kids of Morkhoven, of Flemish origins, for whom 32 hold-ups only sentenced them to an electronic bracelet. The kid from Mechelen, of Arabic origins, was recognized guilty of 16 facts of violence. He had declared having acted alone for bank robberies, which proves he was ready to spend a little longer in jail, to protect his partners in crime from hell. Since, he has been interned as a "mental patient" due to an "obsession of running away". It acts of a Belgian justice subtlety, which makes it possible to its psychosocial services to prolong any imprisonment, for as a long as the minister likes it. At the age of 26, he has seen freedom during his majority only during these 5 months of escape.

- Outside, you see only cinema, telephones us a prisoner of Bruges. Who talks of that a 16 year old kid sentence for life? At this price, one only has the choice between suicide and break out. The direction of the prison is furious. The minister makes big speeches. But when a prisoner committed suicide last winter, they did not even take the trouble to advise his mother. She was coming to see him every week. The direction gave a guard the mission to advise her of her son's death, after having made her pass the metal detector, after making her wait half an hour in the waiting room, buying the plastic coins necessary to offer him a drink, only once she sat in the visiting room. Here, no humanity, but a show for the free world: 31 guards are in charged of 3 prisoners in the high security district, who are paid to fiddle their thumbs, 100 euros more than our guards, who on the opposite, are overworked for less money. This show manages to convince the voters that more prisons have to be built, but hides that it provides extra hand work paid 69 cents an hour. It can only weigh on unemployment: why would a contractor pay unemployed people, if the prisoners hardly cost anything?

Ashraf Sekkaki, a "big chief" entered in prison at the age of 16, became in 5 months' escape, "one of the 5 heaviest cases of the country", "the terror of the cops" and now is "the brain of the break-out", says the press. He would be an "authentic psychopath", according to the spokesperson of the ministry, which last year, had authorized the publication of his comments on the district of high security: - "In the Middle Ages", said the kid of Mechelen, "they threw people like me in an oubliette. In our days, the same thing is happening, except that you do not die any more of hunger and of thirst. I feel as in a laboratory where they want to test up to what extent they can go."

The minister of time wished to have an opportunity of denial on the "Guantanamo" block of the Bruges prison, at the time when we discovered its medical extermination block, of which Marcel Vervloesem got out alive, without that any doctor manages to explain. This minister had then said to be "flabbergasted", not by the contents of disseminated information but by the "bad faith" and the "distance compared to the reality". The text was "disobliging and hurtful as regards of the staff and even of the prisoners of the division (...). It gives a very incomplete and consequently unfair picture of the penitentiary policy". What he forgot, is that no one reproaches the gards to do what they are ordered, but that we consider this policy monstrous.

Justice is the sole responsible for what Ashraf Sekkaki became, for having imposed him an inhuman world, when he was only a big kid. All the prisoners wish him good luck, that he may melt in nature and live his life as a man, without ever approaching a prison again. Interpol after him, he has not much chance to succeed. This is why it is necessary to have European constraining laws, to protect the children from prison, from life sentences via the psychiatric and psychosocial services of ministries of justice. To protect Europe from a slave system that weighs on unemployment and scandalous savings on the prisoners' health care.

HOME

Spectacular prison break from an ex child prisoner