N. China prison escapees still on run

By Hu Yinan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-20 10:00

Four convicts who killed a police officer and broke out of prison in Hohhot, capital city of the Inner Mongolia autonomous region on Saturday, are "most certainly" in the hide in the city's Shebiya township, police said.

The men fled south from Hohhot and were approaching Shanxi province Monday afternoon, when police found clothes thought to belong to them in Horinger county, 35 km south of the city.

They then turned around and headed northwest to Shebiya, a township under Horinger's jurisdiction, local police said at around 9 pm Monday.

More than 100 police vehicles were mobilized to Shebiya as hundreds of police closed in on the search, which they expected to be over soon.

More than 600 paramilitary troops were searching in Horinger as local police set up posts to stop the four from fleeing further south into Shanxi, according to China National Radio.

Police believed the men were still together.

Horinger is about 190 km north of Shanxi's Shuozhou city, where police have been mobilized to capture the men, who reportedly have only around 700 yuan ($100), which they robbed earlier.

As police in Shuozhou remained on high alert, the massive manhunt involving more than 6,000 armed police and security officers continued across Inner Mongolia.

Around 2:30 pm on Saturday, the four men grabbed a police officer surnamed Xu, tied him up, and killed officer Lan Jianguo inside the city's No 2 prison, according to Xinhua News Agency.

Li Hongbin, one of the four, then put on Xu's uniform and led the others, who had changed into civilian clothes, through three gates. The convicts stabbed two police officers during that process, Xinhua said.

The men hijacked a taxi passing by the prison gate, pulled its driver out, robbed her and drove away. When that taxi ran out of gas, they took another and headed toward downtown Hohhot, said Liu Haidong, director of Hohhot police department's command center.

Both taxis have been found within the city's jurisdiction, according to Yan Bingqiang, deputy chief of police of Inner Mongolia.

Lan, the murdered officer, was in his 30s and had worked in the prison for more than a decade. His twin daughters are just 2 years old, prison authorities were quoted as saying.

Zhou Yongkang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the top official responsible for law and order, ordered the manhunt to capture the runaways.

Warrants have been issued by the Ministry of Public Security for the arrest of Qiao Haiqiang, Dong Jiaji, Gao Bo and Li. All four are in their 20s. Two of the four were in prison sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, while the other two were serving life in prison.

Gao had been found guilty of manslaughter while the other three were guilty of robbery.

Officials with the Hohhot justice bureau have called the prison break a "negligent accident on the part of prison management" and are considering penalties for the parties involved, according to a report on the Legal Daily website.

The Hohhot No 2 prison's modern monitoring facilities and heavy police detachments should make it impossible for inmates to escape, according to Tang Ji, chief law reporter with Xinhua News Agency's Inner Mongolia bureau.