Jailbreak king Rédoine Faïd recaptured three months after fleeing 'escape-proof' prison in hijacked helicopter

The “jailbreak king” of Europe has been recaptured three months after he escaped from an ”escape-proof” French jail in a hijacked helicopter.

Rédoine Faïd was caught napping in bed before he could reach for the loaded pistol that lay beside him.

The armed police raid ended a manhunt that had begun on 1 July after a Hollywood-style escape that even the French justice minister Nicole Belloubet conceded had been “spectacular” and “extremely well planned”.

Faïd, who once boasted that he saw everything “in cinemascope”, escaped from the Prison de Réau near Paris in a breakout involving two Kalashnikov-toting accomplices who ordered a terrified flying instructor to take his helicopter to the one point in the jail not covered by anti-aircraft netting.

It had been thought that despite his Algerian parentage Faïd, 46, might flee to Israel and disguise himself as an Orthodox Jew, repeating the tactics he adopted in 1997 after a robbery went wrong.

Instead he went only as far as his home town of Creil, about an hour’s drive from Paris, and he disguised himself, not as an Orthodox Jew, but as a woman in a burqa.

Ms Belloubet said “numerous tips” had led to Faïd’s recapture.

Paris prosecutor Francois Molins told a press conference that the fugitive was spotted by police on 24 July in the Paris region alongside his older brother Rachid.

In the ensuing high-speed car chase, however, the two brothers managed to escape.

Their vehicle was found abandoned in a shopping centre parking lot in Sarcelles. Inside were fake explosives and fake licence plates which added to the lengthening trail of clues leading to Faïd.

Police were eventually able to monitor some of the mobile phones used by the jailbreak gang, and this led them to start watching a young woman in Creil.

Mr Molins said that at the weekend, the surveillance team watched as the woman “picked up in her car a person dressed in a burqa whose figure led them to think it was actually a man”.

Then, late on Tuesday night, the figure in the burqa was seen getting out of the car and going into the woman’s apartment block, followed by someone else in a burqa.

Suspecting the people in the burqas were Rédoine and Rachid Faïd, police chiefs gave the orders for a pre-dawn raid.

The operation involved 120 police officers including members of the elite Brigade for Research and Intervention unit.

Armed police burst into the fourth-floor apartment at 4.20am on Wednesday. Faïd did not have time to react and reach for the loaded handgun at his bedside.

Nor did anyone else in the apartment manage to get to what looked like an Uzi sub-machine gun lying on the floor.

Faïd and six others including his brother Rachid, two of his nephews and the young woman, were arrested without a shot being fired.

As well as the weapons, burqas and wigs were found in the apartment.

It was the second time that Faïd has been recaptured after a jailbreak.

His first prison escape was in 2013. While awaiting trial at Sequedin prison in northern France, Faïd pulled a pistol out of a bag, fired a shot in the air and took four prison guards hostage.

The box of paper tissues he was carrying concealed plastic explosives and fuses, which he used to blast his way through four gates to the prison car park and the waiting getaway vehicle.

During his time on the run he was declared France’s public enemy number one, but he was recaptured after six weeks.

Before that, Faïd’s criminal career had involved armed robberies that seemed like homages to his favourite gangster and heist movies.

One of his first bank robberies gave a real-life French twist to the 1991 film Point Break, which featured a gang of thieves hiding their identities behind masks of former US presidents.

Faïd and his gang disguised themselves as Charles de Gaulle and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, borrowing a line from the film to tell their victims: “Thank you for voting for me”.

During a 1997 security van holdup, Faïd and his crew donned ice-hockey goalkeeper masks, as worn by the robbers led by Robert De Niro in the 1995 film Heat.

Soon afterwards, however, despite his flit to Israel, Faïd was arrested. He spent from 1998 to 2009 behind bars serving a sentence for armed robbery.

After his release, he wrote a book about his exploits and carved out a niche as a suave, “reformed” ex-bank robber TV chat show guest.

French police, however, maintain that Faïd was the brains behind a May 2010 security van raid that went fatally wrong.

After the robbers were spotted by police, they led officers on a wild chase along a French motorway.

The thieves shot at the pursuing police, injuring motorists as they did so, and then at Villiers-sur-Marne, southeast of Paris, they strafed a police car, killing officer Aurélie Fouquet, 26.

Faïd was linked to the crime and returned to jail. While awaiting trial for the botched robbery, he made his 2013 escape.

In 2017 he was sentenced to 10 years in jail for the escape and 18 years’ prison for the botched robbery.

In April, after he failed in an appeal against the robbery sentence, his jail time was increased to 25 years.

Three months later, despite being kept on isolation wings and having a guard accompany him wherever he went, Faïd escaped.

Now he has been recaptured, Faïd is likely to have even more jail time added on to his current 25-year sentence.

Ms Belloubet, the justice minister, has announced that he will be prosecuted for his jailbreak, and added that he will be held in a high-security prison with “extremely tight surveillance”.