The recent escape of Pedro David, sentenced to 28 years for kidnapping for ransom, revealed serious flaws in the controls of the National Penitentiary and Prison Institute (Inpec).
The director of the National Order Detention Establishment (Eron), Horacio Bustamante, provided a detailed version of what happened and pointed out the exact point where the protocol was broken.
In an interview with W Radio this Tuesday, December 9, Bustamante assured that the escape was carried out through the well-known “change” method, a modality that had not been seen in the Colombian prison system for almost 20 years.
As he explained, there is a specialized team (Identification and Review) in charge of comparing fingerprints to avoid this type of maneuvers. However, on Sunday, that filter failed.
The director reported that a visitor entered the prison to see Pedro David, and at the end of the meeting, he remained inside the prison, allowing the inmate to use his documents and his entry form to impersonate him. “The prisoner left practically walking”he stated.
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Bustamante specified that the key failure occurred in the fingerprint control, when the official in charge of the procedure gave a “positive approval” for the exit, when she should have marked it as negative.
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He denied that there was fraud: “She is an excellent dragoneer, a person with a track record. That day she attended to more than 400 reviews from visitors.” Even so, as protocol dictates, the worker will face disciplinary and criminal investigation.
The visitor who facilitated the escape is already in the custody of the Prosecutor’s Office. The authorities established that he had shared a cell with Pedro for more than a decade in the Modelo prison, and that the maneuver would have been planned in advance.
Bustamante also warned of the urgent need to modernize technology in Colombian prisons: “Today we unlock a cell phone with our face, but in prisons we continue with manual methods. We need biometric readers and facial recognition.”
The security cameras will allow responsibilities to be established while the investigation progresses to determine if the escape occurred solely due to human error or if there was additional complicity.
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