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How not to hijack a helicopter


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From The Times:

 

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Whirlwind romance . . . but helicopter jailbreak is a flop

 

A Belgian drug dealer used his own name while posing as a television producer to hire and then hijack a helicopter in an attempt to spring his wife, charged with murder, out of prison.

 

The plot by Mike Gielen, 24, was modelled on a daring jailbreak from a high-security prison near Bruges 11 years ago but failed because there was no room in the courtyard to land. Tom van Overbeke, his lawyer, said that his client had admitted the act. He added: “The whole thing has been staged quite amateurishly.”

 

Gielen met Kristel Appelt, 27, while both were waiting to see visitors last year in the mixed-sex Hasselt prison. The pair conducted their romance while taking computer lessons together and were married behind bars last November.

 

On Friday Gielen and two accomplices, aged 22 and 18, chartered a AS355 Écureuil helicopter at Antwerp airport, telling the female pilot, aged 36, that they were taking shots of Brussels tourist sites for a television documentary.

 

The plan was to copy the notorious 2009 jailbreak and the escape of three of Belgium’s most wanted criminals.

 

Producing a replica firearm, and after a violent struggle, Gielen and his accomplices forced the pilot to fly low over the Forest prison, to which Appelt had since been transferred. According to witnesses they circled above the Berkendael women’s wing several times but were unable to land. Gielen, who was airsick, lent out of the aircraft and vomited five times.

 

After a two-hour flight they reached the town of Hélécine where Gielen’s father was waiting with a getaway car. Investigators had no trouble tracking the gang down because the suspects made no effort to hide their identities and the helicopter was hired using Gielen’s real name. Belgian press reports also suggest that he was wearing a tracking ankle bracelet after his release on probation from a prison for drug trafficking in December. The four men face charges of kidnapping the pilot, conspiracy to attempt a jailbreak, theft and gang violence.

 

Appelt is charged with the murder of an ex-boyfriend, who died after being stabbed in a street fight in the presence of another man who is the father of her three children.

 

For their wedding photos, taken in prison, Gielen and Appelt mimicked gun-toting scenes from the 2005 film Mr & Mrs Smith starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

 

“I will keep waiting for her. Even if it takes 30 years before she is released,” Gielen told Het Belang van Limburg newspaper last year. “I don’t care. Our love is forever.”

 

 

 

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