Police searching for the escaped terrorism suspect Daniel Abed Khalife are investigating the possibility he had help from within Wandsworth prison to carry out his “clearly pre-planned” getaway, the Scotland Yard chief, Sir Mark Rowley, has said.
The force also confirmed it was searching for signs of Khalife, a former British soldier, in Richmond Park, in south-west London, not far from the prison he escaped from.
The escape has prompted two inquiries, and led to major political fallout. On Friday, the Metropolitan police commissioner, Rowley, said the fact Khalife remained at large was “extremely concerning”.
It is believed Khalife, 21, slipped out of the kitchen at HMP Wandsworth, where he was working, and strapped himself to the bottom of a food delivery van. A hunt is under way to track him down, with enhanced security checks at ports and airports that have led to delays for passengers. There have been no confirmed sightings so far.
Rowley told LBC radio: “It is clearly pre-planned, the fact that he could strap himself on to the bottom of the wagon.” He added that a prison escape was “unlikely to be something you do on the spur of the moment”.
Asked if police were looking into whether it was an “inside job”, he said: “It is a question. Did anyone inside the prison help him? Other prisoners, guard staff? Was he helped by people outside the walls or was it simply all of his own creation?”
The commissioner said the hunt for Khalife was a “massive operation” involving “well into three figures of officers” as well as help from forces around the country and from the Border Force. “At the moment we are still really keen to get any reports from members of the public,” he added.
On Friday, the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, declined to comment on whether he was confident Khalife would be found.
“We do have fantastic security services and police services. I don’t think it would be useful or credible for me to speculate. The important thing is that we let the police, the investigators, do their work,” he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain programme.
Asked whether he was surprised to learn that the terrorism suspect was in a category B prison, Rowley said it did “seem odd” on first inspection.
That came as the Prison Officers Association blamed the escape on cuts introduced by Conservative-led governments over the past 13 years. Its national chair, Mark Fairhurst, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The clear link is going back to 2010, when the Tory government came into power and hit us all with austerity measures.
“For example, within the Prison Service, they removed £900m from the budget, they brought in a voluntary exit scheme – we’re now in a position where we’ve lost over 100,000 years of experience because of staff leaving, and experienced staff continue to leave because of working conditions and the levels of violence.”
Cleverly, speaking later to the same programme, claimed there was no evidence that cuts imposed by his party in government were to blame because, he said, the number of escapes had decreased dramatically, while “4,000 extra prison officers” had been recruited.
In reality, Fairhurst said, the Prison Service was “now unable to retain the staff we recruit”. He said that, while the recent recruitment drive had brought in 4,000 new officers, the net staffing increase was only 700 due to the loss of experienced officers. “That tells you everything about the working conditions in our prisons.”
He told Today: “The last time I visited Wandsworth, they were locking up 1,600 prisoners. They have only got a certification to lock up 979, so they are chronically overcrowded.”
Asked how staffing levels could be to blame when the security posts were staffed at the time of Khalife’s escape, he said: “To safely supervise 1,600 prisoners, when I visited, they only had 69 prison officers on duty.
“Now, if you’re telling me that the gate area was fully staffed, what are those staffing levels? Because I know they should have had at least 120 prison officers on duty yesterday, and they had nowhere near that. They had less than 100 prison officers.
“But, more importantly, what training had the staff had in those critical areas? And not every area is staffed by a prison officer. The kitchen is civilianised – we were privatised years ago – so what sort of training have the civilian staff had in the kitchen? Were they lone-working in the kitchen? They shouldn’t be lone-working at all. So these are the questions that need to be answered.”
