Notorious French Gangster Redoine Faid Makes Brazen Escape With Explosives.

A notorious French gangster is back on the loose after a brazen, movie-like escape from a north France prison using explosives and hostages.
“It happened very quickly, it was clearly very well organized, we are still busy putting the facts together,” an official told Metro.
Twenty-six different European nations are on high alert and have authority to arrest Redoine Faid, a 40-year-old who had been serving time at the Sequedin prison in Lille for several armed robberies.
Called a “particularly dangerous prisoner” by a state prosecutor, Faid added another incredible stunt Saturday to his long list of crimes.
He held five people, including four guards, hostage as he blasted through five different prison doors, setting fire to his getaway car and vanishing without a trace in another vehicle south of Lille.
“I thought my last hour had come,” said Rose Lafont, who told Metro she was visiting her son at the prison during the escape. “Suddenly, everything started blowing up. The walls started shaking, as did the windows and the doors. I was really scared.”
No one was injured and no one knows where Faid is.
“The hunt will initially focus on Belgium of course because we share a border but also extend to the entire Schengen area and beyond,” France’s justice minister Christiane Taubira told reporters.
Faid fashions himself to be the real-life character Robert De Niro portrayed in “Heat,” donning a hockey mask to carry out an armored truck robbery during one heist. He wrote in an autobiography that the De Niro role and the movie “Scarface” offered inspiration for his crime spree.
Like De Niro, Faid’s luck ran out after he was captured in 1998 following three years on the run for a series of armed robberies. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, served 10 and was released on parole. But his alleged involvement in a 2010 robbery that left a young policewoman dead sent him back to jail to serve out his sentence.
"He is remarkably intelligent, and he is using his intellect to serve his ambitions," his attorney, Jean-Louis Pelletier told BFMTV. "(And Faid) cannot stand being imprisoned anymore."
Faid wrote an autobiography about his rise to notorious gangster with storylines similar to that of the life of Jacques Mesrine, whose streak of robberies and prison escapes ended in 1979 when he was gunned down in Paris, CNN reported.