Police in Bali held a reenactment on Thursday of the brazen jail break of four foreign inmates from the Indonesian island’s notorious Kerobokan Prison.
Crime reenactments, where police take perpetrators through reconstructed scenes based on their investigation’s findings are routine for cases in Bali.
Two of the four inmates, who have since been recaptured after their breakout on June 19, participated in the reconstruction and were made to act out a series of ‘scenes’ from their escape, alongside police.
Meanwhile, Australian Shaun Edward Davidson and MalaysianTee Kok King remain at large.
For Bulgarian Dimitar Nikolov Iliev and Indian Sayed Mohammed Said, freedom was fleeting. The pair was recaptured in East Timor at a luxury hotel on June 21 and sent back to Bali, back to Kerobokan.
Thursday’s reenactment lasted for 33 scenes, from when the inmates busted out of the jail and crawled through a tunnel under a prison wall, to when Iliev and Said went to Bali’s Ngurah Rai Airport to depart Indonesia and travel to East Timor with tickets purchased by a “helpful” ex-Kerobokan prisoner. Iliev and Said were “very cooperative” during the reenactment, according to local news coverage.
“From block D they climbed to the roof and went outside and came down and they dug a hole behind the clinic,” Police Superintendent Ruddy Setyawan said, as quoted by ABC.
“They cleared out the water out of the hole — it was raining at the time.”
Because of all the rain after the prisoners’ escape, police had actually feared that the prisoners may have died from drowning, trapped in the tiny tunnel–but we later found out that that wasn’t the case.
The escape took about four and a half hours from when the prisoners escaped their cells to when they made it to the outside.
“After they got out of prison they changed clothes that they had brought from inside jail,” Inspector Setyawan said.
The prison was secured on Thursday while the reenactment ran, by around 200 personnel deployed by Bali Police.
Kerobokan Prison Warden Tony Nainggolan told local reporters that he was only informed about the reenactment the day before.
“After receiving information that there will be a reconstruction, we immediately held an internal meeting. We held it in the area of the jail’s Block Bedugul, which is occupied by foreign prisoners, so the reconstruction process could run safely and orderly,” Nainggolan said.
Kerobokan is severely overcrowded, with a recent Australian broadcast investigation revealing that there were some 1,300 prisons in a facility originally designed for just 300. The ABC segment reported that there were only eight guards for whole jail—and four of those guards are stationed in towers.
While the reconstruction has apparently given police investigators a clearer view of how the four foreign inmates escaped, the Australian Facebook sensation and the Malaysian drug smuggler remain ‘somewhere out there.’
Police earlier this week claimed to have known Davidson’s location and say they issued an Interpol orange alert for him, only for the Aussie’s purported Facebook account to respond, saying his location is old news. After the Australian media reported that Davidson was goading police, he followed up again later with a status saying he wasn’t “taunting” police and claiming that and he’s “just having fun.”
The Australian, who was serving a year-long sentence for using a stolen passport, was apparently motivated to flee prison just 10 weeks before his release date because he would have been deported and faces drug charges back home in Australia.
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