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A prisoner who escaped from a French jail hidden in a laundry bag has been rearrested, authorities have said, amid a continuing debate over prison security and overcrowding.
Elyazid A, 20, known as “the Joker” or “the Equaliser”, was detained early on Monday morning as he emerged from a cellar in a village about 15 miles (25km) from Lyon-Corbas, the prison from which he escaped on Friday.
Prison officers had not noticed his disappearance until he had been gone for 24 hours. They said he escaped in a large plastic laundry bag filled with clothes wheeled out of the prison on a trolley by one of his cellmates who was released on Friday.
The cellmate is still being sought, police said. The justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, has ordered an investigation into the circumstances of the escape, as have Lyon public prosecutors, the French prison service and Lyon-Corbas jail itself.
Sébastien Cauwel, the national prison service chief, said Elyazid A, who was in prison for a range of relatively minor offences but also under investigation for alleged criminal association and conspiracy to murder, had not been flagged as a security risk.
Cauwel told BFMTV that the escape method was “extremely rare” and the fact it had succeeded was “the consequence of a series of dysfunctions – serious and inadmissible dysfunctions – inside this prison, which are now being fully investigated”.
He said the episode appeared to be a result of “human rather than material” failing inside the prison, but added that severe overcrowding “obviously makes the prison officers’ job somewhat more difficult than it might otherwise be”.
Lyon-Corbas prison was designed for 678 inmates but holds almost 1,220, according to report in May by the Lyon bar association, which called for an “urgent end to overcrowding so as to respect fundamental rights and human dignity”.
France’s total prison population of 85,000 is housed in jails meant to accommodate fewer than 63,000, Cauwel said. He said it was possible officers had not noticed the escape because cells that were no longer fully occupied “are immediately refilled”.
According to a 2024 Council of Europe report, France’s 186 prisons have the worst overcrowding rate in the EU after those in Cyprus and Romania. Spectacular escapes are not uncommon, with nearly 20 helicopter breakouts since the 1980s.
Unions say the prison service is understaffed by at least 5,000 officers. In April, 21 people were arrested after a wave of attacks hit multiple French jails, with automatic weapons fired at the entrance to Toulon prison in the south of the country.
In other incidents, cars were set alight and prison officers’ accommodation was vandalised in what media described as a “declaration of war” by drug cartels after a government crackdown on traffickers and the imposition of tougher conditions for kingpins operating inside jails.
The justice ministry has said it is working to improve general prison conditions, with measures including new high-security prisons for the most dangerous detainees aimed at combating organised crime that often continues to be run from inside jails.
