PARIS — Redoine Faid’s escape from a French prison landed him on Interpol’s most wanted list today, two days after he took four guards hostage and used explosives hidden inside tissue packets to blast his way out of a prison in Lille. Faid freed his hostages along his getaway route.
It wasn’t the first time that Faid, an armed robber being held in the death of a police officer, had gone on the lam. He was arrested in 1998 after three years on the run in Switzerland and Israel, according to the French media. Faid was freed after serving 10 years of his 31-year sentence, then swore he had turned his life around, writing a confessional book about his life of crime and going on an extensive media tour.
“When I was on the run, I lived all the time with death, with fear of the police, fear of getting shot,” he told Europe 1 radio at the time.