Moscow Mafia spring Russia's Jackal

A legendary figure of Russia's underworld, a contract killer known variously as Alexander the Great and the Russian Jackal, has escaped from a Moscow prison, leaving a dummy in his bed and scaling a wall with a rope after crime bosses put up $500,000 (pounds 320,000) in bribes.

A former policeman, martial- arts enthusiast and expert marksman, Alexander Solonik, 35, fled on Monday along with a guard from a maximum-security jail, Itar-Tass reported yesterday.

Solonik had confessed to a string of contract murders but never identified his employers, who are said to have rewarded his loyalty to the Russian version of the Italian Mafia's code of omerta by making generous donations to a special escape fund. The money is thought to have been used in part to bribe the guard, named only as police sergeant Menshikov, who disappeared with him.

Solonik, who was sacked from the police after being accused of rape, was arrested in October after a shoot-out during a routine document check. He shot dead four policemen and injured several before being shot through the kidney.

He had been arrested several times before, but each time managed to flee, leaping from a courtroom and crawling through sewage pipes. To conceal his identity after a previous escape, he tried to have plastic surgery on his face, Tass reported.

His latest getaway delivers yet another blow to the tainted reputation of a police force widely regarded as venal and incompetent. Few contract murders, even those of prominent public figures, are ever solved. Among these is the murder in March of Vladislav Listyev, a popular television personality whose death triggered nation-wide grief and outrage.

Sevodnya newspaper described Solonik as "one of the best-known and most ruthless contract killers . . . His nearly supernatural ability to vanish and then reappear again might easily be compared to that of the international terrorist Carlos the Jackal".