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.
Khalife had secured himself a position working in the prison canteen, considered a plum role for somebody who could be trusted. It was also a place where deliveries would routinely take place, bringing in food to the 1,500-plus inmates and staff at the south London jail first built in 1851.
Police were not called by the prison until 8.15am and the van was not stopped until it had travelled about three miles in the morning rush hour to nearby Upper Richmond Road, by which time Khalife had disappeared.
Although Khalife was not described as dangerous to the public, Dominic Murphy, the Met’s counter-terrorism commander, emphasised that he “has military training” and that “we have some of the best military training in the UK”. That may have contributed to his willingness to stage a risky breakout attempt.
Khalife had been detained at Wandsworth, a medium security category B prison, since the beginning of the year. On remand, he was facing trial on three charges related to espionage and terrorism, with a full hearing scheduled to start at Woolwich crown court in November.
Pictures released on Thursday show a young slim, smiling soldier, who first trained in 2019 and joined the Royal Signals. But in January, everything changed. The first charge was that he had devised a simple fake bomb, made up, the Crown said in its initial prosecution, of “three canisters with wires” at his barracks in Stafford.
A second charge was that, while serving, Khalife had, in August 2021, elicited personnel information from an MOD information system about members of the armed forces “which is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”.
Finally, he was accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act over a period of over three years, between May 2019 and January 2022, by collecting or sharing documents or information that could be “directly or indirectly useful to an enemy” – understood to be Iran, a state that is supporting Russia in its war in Ukraine and is frequently considered hostile to the UK.
The simple mystery is how Khalife managed to get out. Delivery vans in prison are hardly a novelty and they are subject to security checks as they go in and out. It should have been possible to have spotted the prisoner by using a mirror to search under the van, but he managed to get through the checks.
Prison inspectors suggested the state of Wandsworth prison was to blame. Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, said at lunchtime “the issue that we are particularly concerned about is there are too many prisoners in Wandsworth for the amount of staff who are there”. In doing so, he was reflecting the findings of a damning inspection he conducted two years ago, in September 2021.
Wandsworth was described as “crumbling, overcrowded, vermin-infested” and barely able to cope. The document warned repeatedly of the impact of staff shortages. Morale is described as low, as reflected in “a high level of staff sickness absence”.
In conclusion, the inspectors said that “staffing shortfalls were preventing the prison from running a decent and predictable regime. More than 30% of prison officers were either absent or unable to work their full duties.” A quarter had worked at the prison for less than a year, and over a tenth had resigned during the same time.
What is not clear is whether that made a difference in Khalife’s escape. Mindful of Labour attacks on the staffing crisis, Alex Chalk, the justice secretary, told MPs earlier on Thursday that “security positions were staffed”, as he sought to hint at a lapse in standards rather than lack of resources.
Other misjudgments were made. It was clear that Khalife was not considered a significant flight risk, despite the terrorism charges, because he was not being held in a maximum security prison like Belmarsh. Not only that, but he ended up being allowed to work in the kitchen, from where he was able to escape, wearing red and white checked trousers.
The use of strapping to help him hide under the delivery van suggests the escape was probably pre-planned. Police said last night they were keeping “an open mind” as to whether anybody had helped him, warning that anybody who had helped him would have committed serious criminal offences themselves.
However, a day and a half after Khalife’s escape, police have been surprised to report there have been no confirmed sightings of the man on the run. A public appeal was not made until 3.30pm on Wednesday, more than seven hours after he first disappeared, although it did yield a false report on social media suggesting he had been arrested in Banbury, Oxfordshire, prompting a rare denial from the Met.
“This was a really busy area of London,” Murphy said. That the escaped prisoner has yet to be seen, he added was “perhaps a testament to Daniel Khalife’s ingenuity”. Finding him, meanwhile, will be a high-profile test of the police’s effectiveness at a time when questions are being asked about the state of Britain’s prisons.
