Spanish police have arrested a fugitive dubbed the “Master of Escapes” after he broke out of prison four times, most recently from a maximum-security facility in Italy, authorities said Wednesday.
The man, wanted by Italy under a European arrest warrant, escaped from the jail there in December by sawing through window bars and lowering himself with knotted bedsheets, Spain’s National Police said in a statement.
Police said he had previously escaped from prisons in Terni and Parma in Italy and from a Belgian prison, where he used a human pyramid to scale the walls.
“It sounds like something out of a film, but sometimes reality is stranger than fiction,” police said in the statement.
The man was arrested in the northeastern Spanish city of Tarragona after police tracked him to a neighbourhood where he was believed to be living.
Authorities said he resisted arrest and that several people accompanying him tried to intervene, with one allegedly injuring two officers.
Spanish police gave only the man’s initials, T.T., which correspond to those of Toma Taulant, an Albanian national known in Italian media as a “mago della fuga”, or “escape wizard”.
Taulant escaped from a maximum-security prison in Milan in December.
He was serving a prison sentence due to expire in 2048 for a series of offences including violent robbery, theft and drug dealing, according to Italian media reports.
The fugitive was carrying false identification documents and two €500($582) notes suspected of being counterfeit, Spanish police said.
A judge ordered him to be held in provisional custody without bail pending extradition proceedings to Italy.
