Four migrants managed to escape a Swedish detention facility over the weekend after using a tool to tunnel a hole through the facility’s wall as police claim there is no active search for the missing migrants.
The four migrants, who are still at large, managed to escape the detention facility in the municipality of Åstorp just outside of the city of Helsingborg over Sunday night and into Monday morning.
The Swedish Migration Agency, which runs the detention facility, has begun an investigation into the escape and how the escapees were able to tunnel through the wall of the facility without staff noticing their activity, broadcaster SVT reports.
The hole, which was covered by a cupboard, was not noticed until a routine check by staff discovered the four migrants were missing from the facility, with a source telling SVT that the migrants may have had help on the inside as none of the excess material of the wall was discovered and the migrants must have been given some sort of tools to tunnel their way out.
Åsa Emanuelsson, a press spokesperson for the police in the northwest of the Skåne region, said that despite the great escape, police were not actively searching for the missing migrants.
“People disappear from custody all the time, from the police side we are not actively looking for them. It would be if we encounter them during regular checks or through tips from the public,” Emanuelsson said.
Maria Lindgren, a section manager at the Migration Agency, added that the four migrants were not considered to be dangerous individuals.
Prior intricate escapes by migrants from detention facilities have been seen in recent years, such as an incident involving a Swedish female priest who allegedly was able to sneak a migrant from a detention facility in Gävle in 2020 by hiding him in a large suitcase.
The female priest had brought the large suitcase claiming it contained materials needed for an adult baptism ceremony but was accused of using it to help facilitate the escape by Director-General of the Migration Board Mikael Ribbenvik.
Later that year in France, two groups of migrants totalling 13 people were also able to escape a detention facility in the city of Metz, although several of the migrants were arrested a short time after their escape.
The first group of five migrants cut a path through the facility’s mesh wire fencing, while the second group just 48 hours later took advantage of the actions of the first escapees as the breach of the fencing had not been sufficiently fixed.