Convicts stage two daring escapes from King’ong’o Prison

Escaping from prison has been portrayed in various blockbuster action films such as A Mere Walk in the Park and Prison Break.

All you have to do – according to these epic films – is trick a friendly prison guard, do a few somersaults in the air and clobber him unconscious before grabbing his bunch of keys and unlocking the handcuffs.

Next, you scale tall perimeter walls while braving a hail of live fire from prison guards before jumping into a waiting chopper on the other side of the fence. That is the standard procedure we see in movies but which two daring inmates at King’ong’o Maximum Prison in Nyeri did not apply when they escaped from custody in less than five minutes.

All the inmates did was dodge a contingent of armed prison guards escorting them to the Nyeri Law Courts. The two were literally ‘missing in action’ for a good 30 minutes.

David Simiyu and Simon Mwangi were hardcore criminals facing murder charges and up to six separate counts of robbery with violence before the Nyeri High Court.

On the morning of March 10, 2010, the two had been transported from King’ong’o Prison to the familiar territory of the Nyeri Law Courts for mention of one of the criminal cases against them.

The prison warders had no idea what the two felons had up their sleeves until they arrived at the courts’ parking yard.

As soon as Simiyu and Mwangi’s feet touched the ground, the warders and civilians milling around the parking lot were stunned to see the two bolt to freedom.

The villains quickly blended in with civilians who were running helter-skelter across the compound in a panic.

In seconds, the two had reached the spiked fence and scaled it, jumped onto the tarmac on the other side and vanished into the bushes.

That spelt doom for the prison warders who could not use their firearms to shoot at the fleeing inmates, who were dressed in civilian clothes, for fear of hitting members of the public caught up in the drama.

A combined force of regular and administration police was assembled to assist the few prison warders present comb the bushes around the courts for the two fugitives. Areas around Nyeri town that they frequented and friends whom they would probably contact were put under police scrutiny.

But Simiyu and Mwangi were smart enough not to contact any of their close friends. Instead, they went into hiding in the thickets around River Chania. This was where the combined police force found them and returned them to the courts.

In June of the same year, Mwangi and Simiyu led another attempted prison escape, this time from the highly guarded King’ong’o Main prison.

Shockingly, two inmates managed to jump over the prison’s perimeter fence but broke their limbs badly in the process. Mwangi and Simiyu were arrested while their two other accomplices were admitted to the Nyeri Provincial Hospital under tight security for treatment and charged afresh for attempting to escape from custody.