Yeah, he sure does have them crazy eyes.

Ananias Mathe has a long and storied criminal record, which includes serial rape, house robbing and murder. Not quite content with those labels, he has racked up a history of attempted escapes, leading prison officials to call him South Africa’s own Harry Houdini.

It’s a title he has earned over the years, with this below from TimesLive:

“He is a genius,” a correctional services official at Kokstad prison said yesterday. “He’s trying things that nobody has ever tried before.”

Mathe is the only inmate to try to escape from the cells at what is known as the country’s most secure prison – and he’s tried twice. In 2014 he tried to dig a hole in the wall of his cell but that attempt failed dismally. He was bust. The hole would have led him into his neighbour’s cell.

Now it has emerged that he tried another escape, and this time he was almost successful:

Nobody knows how long Mathe had been working to escape from his cell and correctional officials do not even know what tools he used. Mathe managed to tear away a solid steel strip of the window frame above his bed to expose the normally secure glass pane. He broke the glass and tried to remove the entire frame from the wall.

Presumably his plan was to use his standard-issue two sheets and four blankets as a rope, drop about 10m to the ground below and make a break for it. He then would have to get through, under or over, three barbed wire fences, one of which is electric and into the surrounding fields.

He might have got away with it had it not been for a warder who, at about 7am on September 19, spotted the broken glass.

Mathe might have failed but it was not for lack of trying. Drops of blood on the broken window and blood smears on the walls showed just how far he was prepared to go to get out.

So close, yet so far:

Another official said Mathe might not have been too far from freedom this time around.

“If he was a little more patient, maybe another two or three days, and we couldn’t see the glass had broken, he could have been gone,” the official said.

Mathe will now be under constant surveillance.

I think we can all breath a sigh of relief that Ananias Mathe remains behind bars.

[source:timeslive]