A manhunt is on for four foreign inmates who staged a brazen escape from an Indonesian prison early Monday morning.
The men dug a 15-meter-long (50 foot) tunnel under the wall of Kerobokan prison on the Indonesian island of Bali, according to CNN Indonesia.
One of the men, Australian Shaun Davidson, 33, had less than three months left on his sentence after he was jailed last year for violating immigration law.
The three others — Dimitar Nikolov, 43, from Bulgaria; Sayed Mohammed Said, 31, from India; and Tee Kok King, 50, from Malaysia — were facing between five and 12 more years in prison.
Police said immigration and airport authorities had been alerted and a manhunt was underway.
A spokesman for Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said officials were aware of the alleged escape but would not comment further.
Foreign prisoners
The notorious Kerobokan Prison has been home to many high-profile foreign criminals, including the so-called “Bali Nine” — eight men and a woman from Australia who were convicted in 2006 of smuggling heroin.
Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, the alleged ringleaders, were executed by firing squad in April 2015 despite pleas for mercy from their families, who said the two men had been “fully rehabilitated” after almost a decade in prison.
The incident sparked a diplomatic fallout between Jakarta and Canberra, with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott denouncing the executions as “cruel and unnecessary” and recalling the country’s ambassador.
Kerobokan was also home to Australian Schapelle Corby, who returned home in May after almost nine years in the Bali prison on a controversial drug conviction.
Corby was sentenced in 2005 for smuggling nine pounds of marijuana. She always maintained her innocence, insisting the drugs were planted in her bag, possibly by airport workers involved in trafficking.
Mass escapes
Monday’s prison break comes just over a month after more than 400 inmates escaped a crowded jail in Sumatra.
Hundreds of prisoners broke through a gate, overwhelming guards as others tried to set fire to buildings inside the prison.
Police were able to catch around 200 prisoners, but dozens more were able to evade capture.
Indonesian authorities blamed the mass escape on overcrowding issues and corruption among prison guards.
In 2013, more than 200 inmates broke free from a maximum-security facility in Medan, the capital of the province of North Sumatra. Five people were killed in a riot that began after the water supply was cut off because of a power outage, officials said.