Durban - Notorious prisoner and escape artist Ananias Mathe has made many attempts and two successful break-outs from some of South Africa’s most secure prisons.
Mathe is described by Wikipedia as a serial rapist and armed robber from Mozambique who achieved notoriety in 2006 by being the only person to have ever escaped from the maximum high-security C-Max Penitentiary in Pretoria.
According to reports in 2006, dumbfounded police were "shocked, horrified and disappointed" after the dangerous "Houdini of C-Max" escaped from Pretoria's C-Max Prison, despite having been in handcuffs and leg irons.
Mathe, who became the first person to escape from the prison left the authorities a message on the prison's walls, which simply read "f**k you".
During his escape, Mathe is believed to have stripped and covered his entire body with petroleum jelly to enable him to climb out of a bullet-proof window in his cell, which measured just 20cm by 60cm.
He was able to break through the wall surrounding the window, something which seems impossible in a cell where prisoners are allowed only a toothbrush, mug and spoon, and are shackled at all times.
The cell from where he escaped was about six square metres in size and contained only a bed, toilet, basin and wooden bench.
Once he had managed to remove the window, it is believed that he broke off two steel bars from his bed, which he wedged on either side of the window to help him slide his shoulders out of the window.
Mathe apparently took another steel pipe from his bed and made a hook from it. He then tied his clothes and bed linen to it, and used it to slide out of the cell down the firewall.
Halfway down the wall, Mathe was able to use some of the grime he had collected on his way down to write prison officials his mocking message.
He was captured a month later.
Mathe had also managed to escape Johannesburg Central police station's high-risk detention facility in 2005.
He later told a court the details of the 2005 escape.
Mathe said had been arrested after police linked him to numerous crimes through his fingerprints. After two months in custody, with police denying him contact with relatives and friends, he decided to escape.
Also read: Mathe's life of violent crime
"I was in a holding cell on my own. There was a pipe on the floor under the windows... I got hold of it as some of it was rusted. With this piece, I was able to lift off the hinges of the grid over the louvre panels of the outside windows.
"I had to hit the hinges to get them loose. Then I used the entire pipe to break open the louvre.
"I am not sure of the date; all I know is that the prison guards were singing Happy Birthday to someone, and clapping hands and making a lot of noise."
The "partying" guards gave him ample opportunity, and he left his cell using a rope made from two blankets.
"As I was climbing down, the rope broke and I fell to the floor. There was a gate and a guard was sleeping. There was another guard, also asleep. The gate had a lever."
Prison staff shocked by 'Houdini of C-Max'
Lots of people used that gate while the guards were asleep, and Mathe waited for more to move into the building before he found the right moment to make his getaway.
"Nobody noticed me nor asked me who I was, or where I was going. I was in my civil(ian) clothes and made my getaway," he said.
Mathe was rearrested months later and put into C-Max in Pretoria, from where he tried to escape five times, before finally succeeding.
Last month, Mathe tried to break out of the Ebongweni C-Max Prison near Kokstad - for the second time.
It is understood that Mathe managed to saw bars in his cell and break a window before being apprehended.
Mathe apparently sawed through the prison bars and smashed a window.
“This is one of those strong windows that have plastic inside,” said an official not permitted to speak to the media.
“How he smashed it is not clear. And how he managed to saw the bars we do not know, but it seems that he was doing this at night.
“He claims it was a saw, but where would he get a saw?”
This is his second attempt to escape from Ebongweni C-Max.
In 2013 he tried to get out by chiselling away the wall and damaging the prison sink, but was thwarted when a guard saw him chipping away. He only got as far as making a 33cm cut in the wall, with a few “test” holes, before wardens caught on to his escape plot.
At the time KZN regional Correctional Services commissioner Mnikelwa Nxele promised to resign if any inmate were to escape from the country’s most secure prison.
He said there was no way that any prisoner could escape because of the way the C-Max prison had been designed.
“We want to assure the community that no criminal will ever escape from this prison. The day a prisoner escapes will be the day I resign from the department,” Nxele told reporters, who were given a rare tour of the facility after Mathe’s escape bid.
“He used pieces of metal which he had pulled out of the door frame in his cell,” Nxele said.
Mathe would then peel off paint from another part of the wall, mix it with his toothpaste to match the paint colour and patch up the cuts and holes he had made so that prison warders could not see what he was up to.
Nxele said that Mathe had tried to cut through different parts of the wall, including under his bed, but had been stymied by its strength.
Had he succeeded, he would have merely ended up in the corridor outside his cell and would have been spotted on the cameras, installed at every corner and monitored around the clock, Nxele said.
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