A video still from a surveillance camera depicts a prison break at the Ploetzensee penitentiary Source: DPA/PA Images

It’s now understood that in total nine people escaped the city prison in walkouts and jailbreaks over the past week. Tabloid-style Bild daily labelled the security lapses “incomprehensible”, city-state politicians urged local justice chief Dirk Behrendt to step down, and Twitter users mocked the penal facility’s “open door” policy. View of the 'Justizvollzugsanstalt' (Facility for the Execution of Justice, JVA) Ploetzensee during the morning in Berlin Source: DPA/PA Images

The convicts – doing time for theft, extortion and aggravated assault – broke out through a ventilation shaft before slipping underneath a barbed-wire fence. A perimeter surveillance camera captured their escape, but wardens did not view the footage in real time and took 41 minutes to sound the alarm. In the other incidents:

On Friday 29 December, it emerged that a prisoner had failed to return from day release on Thursday

On Monday 1, January authorities disclosed that two prisoners had escaped overnight through the window of a neighbouring cell - one returned voluntarily

On Tuesday 2 January, Mr Behrendt revealed two more prisoners had escaped over the weekend, though it is unclear whether they broke out or failed to return from day release. And on Monday morning, New Year’s Day, it was learnt that two more prisoners had slipped out overnight through a cell window, with one recaptured by police later that day. Ironically, their escape was going on under the watchful eye of CCTV cameras which filmed the prison break for well over three minutes, according to the DPA news agency. Conservative opposition lawmaker Burkard Dregger attacked the “dilettante” approach of Berlin’s justice minister Dirk Behrendt and called for his resignation. Behrendt tweeted later Tuesday that one of the initial four escapees had just turned himself in, accompanied by a lawyer, and added that he would “now be transferred to a higher-security prison”.
Nine prisoners have escaped from a Berlin, Germany prison over the last five days, with two escaping today.