Clint Eastwood

Copenhagen, Aug. 19 (Reuters): The Clint Eastwood movie Escape from Alcatraz may have inspired five rejected asylum seekers who escaped from a Danish prison through a tunnel they dug from their concrete-floored cell.

It took the prisoners eight months to dig the 10-metre long tunnel, patiently removing eight tonnes of soil in tiny plastic bags, before fleeing the prison in the Sandholmlejren detention centre, north of Copenhagen.

The gaping hole in the cell floor was not discovered because inmates clean their own cells at Sandholmlejren, prison managers said.

Four of the escapees, who faced expulsion to Algeria, Moldova and Ukraine, are still missing and one was caught immediately after the break-out — the first of its kind in Denmark.

Their ingenious escape method is similar to that used in a rare escape from the US maximum-security prison Alcatraz, dramatised in the Eastwood film in 1979.