The initial police probe into the escape Friday of serial rapist Benny Sela revealed a series of severe operational failures both of the police and the Israel Prison Service with respect to the guarding of dangerous felons. The "black box" of the affair is the reconstruction of the events of Friday morning at the Nitzan Prison in Ramle, at which two policemen arrived to transfer Sela to a hearing in Tel Aviv.

The investigation shows that the Prison Service had not informed the police ahead of time that the prisoner to be picked up and transported to Tel Aviv for a hearing at the Labor Court was classified as being at "high flight risk." The police who arrived at the Nitzan Prison to pick up another prisoner suspected of fraud were also asked to take Sela with them, because of a note in the computer stating that a hearing had been set for Sela that morning.

The warders had not been informed four days in advance that Sela was to be transported, as they normally are, and thus were not able to prepare properly for the task.

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Sela, who usually goes twice a month for hearings before the courts involving a variety of petitions he submits, is always accompanied by four armed guards. According to procedure, he is also to be shackled hand and foot. The two police who came to Nitzan Friday decided, for unknown reasons, to agree to the warders' request to transport Sela, despite the fact that they were unprepared for the task. They came out of the facility escorting the two prisoners, without Sela's feet being shackled in accordance with the rules. Eye-witnesses said that when they saw Sela later, as he was fleeing, they did not notice handcuffs. The police expressed concern that Sela was wearing neither hand nor leg restraints during transport.

Only after the police escorting Sela were on their way to Tel Aviv did they realize, through phone calls they received, that Sela was not scheduled to have a hearing in Tel Aviv after all. However, instead of turning back, they decided to keep going so as not to bring the second prisoner to his hearing late.

Another significant failing to be scrutinized concerns the circumstances under which the document summoning Sela to the hearing turned up. The Prison Service computers show an official summons to a court hearing, although no such hearings take place on Fridays. The Prison Service claims that the Courts Administration updated their computer system regarding the non-existent hearing. The Courts Administration, on the other hand, says it never sent the summons. Another check revealed that Sela did indeed have an upcoming court appearence, but not until next month.

The Prison Service's computer receives only data entered by Prison Service personnel. The Courts Administration sends a document summoning a prisoner to court; a Prison Service clerk types it into the system. The question now is whether the fictitious summons was the result of a clerical error, or an inside job.

The special investigative team of the Central Unit of the Tel Aviv District Police will be looking into the circumstances of Sela's escape, while the Yarkon area police continue their search for the serial rapist.

The Tel Aviv district police have appointed an officer to investigate an escape by a detainee at least three times during the past year. In each case, the detainees fled from police escorts in the Tel Aviv district while they were under guard at the Tel Aviv courthouse. Reports were prepared following these escapes, whose conclusions were apparently not entirely implemented with regard to a prisoner's transport to court.

Prison source: Sela planned escape long in advance
A source in the Eshel Prison, where Benny Sela was incarcerated prior to his escape, said Saturday that the escape was apparently not opportunistic and had been planned for some time. According to the source, Sela often ran during his yard time and recently began wearing
running shoes he got from another inmate.

On Thursday, before being taken by the police escort to Ramle Prison, from which he was taken to the Labor Court on Friday morning, Sela told a few prisoners that he was sure to be sent to an isolation cell upon his return since he was carrying forged documents. He even asked one
inmate to telephone his mother and ask her to request that internal prison warden detectives investigate the forgeries. The assumption is that Sela was preparing for the possibility that he would not succeed in escaping and the documents summoning him to the Labor Court would be
discovered, in which case he could claim that he was not involved. The proof: He himself initiated the investigation.

Sela was constantly submitting hearing requests to various courts, including labor and small claims courts, whose relatively light security may have figured in his escape plans.

Public Security Minister Avi Dichter appointed an external inquiry committee to determine how Sela managed to escape, which will hold its first meeting on Sunday. Dichter has asked it to present its findings by Thursday.

The committee will be chaired by former Defense Ministry director general Amos Yaron, and its deputy chair will be Mickey Barel, on Saturday: "It's completely clear that when I appointed such senior people to head the committee, its mandate will not be to deal solely with the lowly guards."

However, the two police guards from whom Sela escaped have in the meantime been suspended.

Four months ago, Dichter decided that the responsibility for taking prisoners to and from court should be transferred from the police to the Israel Prisons Service (IPS), and announced that he intended to do this by the end of next year. However, a senior police officer predicted that the inquiry panel would recommend moving up the hand-over. The police, he explained, generally uses its least experienced men for transporting prisoners, whereas the IPS assigns its best men to this task. Therefore, he said, it would be better to transfer it totally to the IPS.

But whatever structural recommendations the committee might make, an initial inquiry conducted by the police on Friday has already revealed that numerous failures to conform to existing procedure enabled Sela's escape. These included an erroneous notice from the Tel Aviv Labor Court stating that Sela had a hearing there on Friday, when in fact, his hearing was not until December 12; the police's decision to send Sela from Ramle Prison in a low-security transport that had already been arranged for another prisoner who had a hearing at the Tel Aviv Magistrate's Court that same day; and the fact that only his hands were cuffed, and not his legs.

During the drive to Tel Aviv, the two guards discovered that Sela in fact had no hearing that day, so they took him with the other prisoner to the Magistrate's Court. As they were bringing him into the prisoners' courtyard, Sela suddenly turned around and began to run. He climbed up the gate in the wall surrounding the courtyard, reached the top, jumped down on the other side and fled.

About an hour after his escape, with the manhunt already in motion, the police received a call from a Tel Aviv resident who had heard about the escape on the radio and said she had seen Sela in a public park on the city's King David Street. But when the police arrived, four minutes later, Sela was gone: All they found were his brown prison pants, with his name on them.

The resident, Revaha Yosefi, said she had seen Sela removing the pants, and he was wearing jeans underneath. She did not notice whether he was still wearing handcuffs.

Since then, police have received hundreds of calls from Tel Aviv residents who thought they had seen someone resembling Sela, but none have resulted in his capture.

In addition to the manhunt, the police have stationed guards around the victims who testified against him, the prosecutors in the cases and the judges who convicted him, for fear that he might perpetrate revenge attacks.

They are also interrogating Sela's fellow prisoners in an effort to determine whether he planned his escape in advance and whether he had outside help. If he had an escape vehicle or a hiding place arranged in advance, catching him again will be much harder.

If Sela has no outside help, a senior police officer said, he will be recaptured in "three to four weeks." But even if he does have help, the officer predicted, he will have to emerge into the open eventually - if not to buy food, then to satisfy the violent urges that made him a serial rapist to begin with.