Guard slept, another shopped as Al-Ghozi fled

Guard slept, another shopped as Al-Ghozi fled

Agencies, Manila

Red-faced Philippine officials admitted on Wednesday that one police guard was asleep and a second was out shopping when convicted Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) bomber Fathur Rohman Al-Ghozi broke out of his prison cell.

The escape on early Monday of the most senior JI operative in custody in Southeast Asia sparked a region-wide security alert and dismay from the United States and Australia, Manila's key allies in the global war against terrorism.

"The guard who was supposed to be there 24 hours a day was sleeping in the other room," chief police investigator Eduardo Matillano told reporters.

"The lead guard was absent; he was not at his post at the time. He said he had gone somewhere to buy something and saw nothing unusual when he came back."

Al-Ghozi was serving a 15-year prison sentence for procuring explosives after having confessed to his role in the December 2000 bombings that claimed 22 lives in Manila as well as the plot to bomb Western embassies in Singapore.

Philippine police recommended on Wednesday that four prison officers be charged with negligence for the escape of Al-Ghozi from a maximum-security jail this week.

There was still no word on the whereabouts of Al-Ghozi, who escaped from a special detention center at Manila's national police headquarters on Monday.

"If there was collusion, this is the gravest act against our national security done so far by persons within the government," President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said in a statement.

Embarrassed and angered, she had sacked the guards watching Al-Ghozi's cell immediately after the escape came to light. On Wednesday, she appointed a commission of inquiry and insisted on a report within 30 days.

"Those found colluding with terrorists to enable the latter to escape detention must suffer severely from their aiding these enemies of humanity," Arroyo said.

The Indonesian national was being held in the prison housed in the national police headquarters awaiting the outcome of a government petition seeking to transfer him to another jail.

"There were some lapses on the part of security," Matillano said.

Investigators found the jail cell was "intact and sustained no damage," with padlocks still in place, the police official said. The escaped convicts walked along the main hallway, down the stairs to the ground floor and left through the main gate.

Al-Ghozi escaped with two of the three Filipino Abu Sayyaf guerrillas -- on trial for kidnapping -- who shared his four- person cell. The fourth inmate informed guards on early Monday morning that there had been a prison break but they did not believe him as the padlock on the cell remained intact.

It took five hours for the guards to discover the jailbreak, when the cell was physically inspected.

The guards were also remiss in their duties to conduct an hourly headcount of inmates under their care. Rather than physically inspecting the cells and recording their findings in the prison logbook, they just signed the logbook without checking, a grim-faced Matillano said.

Separately, a U.S. embassy spokesman on Wednesday expressed disappointment over the escape of Al-Ghozi from a high-security jail in the Philippines.

"We expressed our disappointment at the escape ... because we think it heightens the risk for all of us in the Philippines," mission spokesman Frank Jenista said in an interview with ABS-CBN television.

"Nevertheless, we want to make it clear that the Philippine- American partnership in the war against terror continues," he stressed.