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The paedophile leader of an outlawed sect and two accomplices escaped by helicopter from a prison on the French Indian Ocean island of Reunion on Tuesday, a local official said.
Juliano Verbard, the 27-year-old founder of the outlawed Christian "Painful and Immaculate Heart of Mary" sect, was jailed for 15 years last year for raping two children.
Three people posing as tourists chartered a helicopter and forced the pilot to fly to the jail in the island's capital, Saint-Denis.
Verbard and two men imprisoned for being his accomplices jumped aboard when it landed in the prison's courtyard. The helicopter then landed in a parking lot a few hundred metres outside the jail and the convicts fled in a waiting van.
"According to our information, they are still on the island. We know their contacts and their network, including in prison," the most senior official on the island, Prefect Pierre-Henry Maccioni, said.
"We are on an island and the situation is rather favourable (to a rapid capture)," Maccioni said. The island's more than 1,000 police have been mobilised to hunt down the men.
The prison was not equipped with anti-helicopter netting despite several high-profile escapes involving helicopters on the mainland.
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