Cai Changpan’s wanted poster. (B1 Photo)
OCTOBER 18, 2020
Jakarta. Cai Changpan, the Chinese national who escaped from a Banten prison by digging a tunnel from his cell, has died on Saturday by assumedly hanging himself at a decommissioned tire-burning factory in Bogor, West Java on Saturday, the police said.
“We find that he hanged himself. Again, we take him to the National Police Hospital [in East Jakarta] for an autopsy,” Chief Comr. Yusri Yunus, the Jakarta Metropolitan Police spokesman, said on Saturday, as quoted by Antara news agency.
Yusri said that the police got information from the factory’s security guard that Cai often spent the night there, but not every day. According to local media reports, Cai used the factory as a base for his drug smuggling operation before his arrest.
“He was also threatened not to report to anyone. When a police team arrived at the factory this morning, they found him already dead,” he said.
Cai was sentenced to death for smuggling 135 kilograms of methamphetamine in 2016. In 2017, he broke out from a police detention center in East Jakarta by carving a hole on his cell wall.
The police later recaptured and detained him at Tangerang class 1 penitentiary in Banten to wait for his execution. But, Cai fled from his cell on Sep. 14 in a daring escape that he planned and worked on for several months, allegedly with helps from prison guards.
Two prison guards allegedly received Rp 100,000 ($6.8) from Cai to help him sourced digging tools, including a water pump used to drain the water from the tunnel. On the day of Cai’s escape, a tower guard and a watch officer in charge of monitoring security cameras’ feed were asleep on their duty. The guards reported that the 53-year-old man had gone missing 11 hours after his escape.
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