It was hardly the most sophisticated escape, and it should have been easy enough to prevent. At 7.32am on Wednesday a food delivery van turned right out of Wandsworth prison’s Victorian gates, concluding what should have been an uneventful run.
Except this time, 21-year-old former soldier and terror and spy suspect Daniel Abed Khalife had managed to strap himself underneath the vehicle, evading the beleaguered jail’s security and becoming only the seventh prisoner to escape from prison in England and Wales in the past five years.
