‘Escape wizard’ who has broken out of four prisons is arrested in Spain

Albanian fugitive dubbed the “escape wizard” caught in Spain after four prison breakouts

Wanderstayfinder.com – For more than a decade, Italian and Belgian correctional services chased a single Albanian man through a catalogue of increasingly audacious jailbreaks — sawn-off steel bars, sheets tied into improvised ropes, and at one point a living tower of fellow inmates used to scale a perimeter wall. That pursuit ended last Friday in Tarragona, a port city on Spain’s north-eastern coast, where Policía Nacional officers cornered the fugitive in his rented accommodation and took him into custody.

The man, identified by the initials TT and confirmed as Toma Taulant, had been living quietly in Tarragona under a false identity. Officers from the national police force located him after cross-referencing a European arrest warrant issued by Italian authorities. Once in hand, Taulant put up what the force described as “strong and active resistance” during the arrest itself. Several Albanian compatriots who had been staying with him attempted to physically prevent the officers from taking him away; one of those men struck and injured two police officers before fleeing the scene. That assailant remains at large.

Four escapes, four methods

The pattern of Taulant’s breakouts spans sixteen years and two countries. Italian media have long referred to him as the “mago della fuga” — the escape wizard — a moniker that the Policía Nacional echoed in its own statement by calling him “the master of escapes.”

The earliest documented breakout took place in 2009 at a facility in Terni, a city in the Umbrian hills. Four years later, in 2013, he repeated the feat from a prison in Parma. That same year, while serving time in Belgium, he executed what remains perhaps the most visually striking of his escapes: a human pyramid, built from fellow inmates, allowed him to climb over the prison wall.

His most recent breakout occurred in December 2025 from a maximum-security prison in Milan. There, he sawed through the window bars and lowered himself to the ground on knotted bed sheets. At the time of that escape, he was serving a sentence that was not scheduled to expire until 2048, imposed for a catalogue of offences including violent robbery, theft, and drug dealing.

“It sounds like something out of a film, but sometimes reality is stranger than fiction,” the Policía Nacional said in a statement describing the arrest.

What officers found in Tarragona

After the initial struggle, a search of the premises and of Taulant’s person turned up a Sig Sauer pistol that had been discarded by one of his associates during the commotion. The weapon has been recovered and is expected to feature in the ongoing investigation into the injured officers.

Taulant was also carrying a set of fabricated identity documents. Those papers revealed a prior criminal record in Girona, a Catalan city south of Barcelona, where he had been charged with possession of weapons and explosives. In his pockets, officers found two €500 banknotes that they believe to be counterfeits. Both notes have been forwarded to the Bank of Spain for forensic examination.

Extradition and the wider picture

Taulant was denied bail by a judge in Tarragona and has been remanded in custody at a local jail while the Spanish authorities process the Italian extradition request. The European Arrest Warrant framework, introduced across EU member states in 2004, is designed to streamline exactly this kind of cross-border handover, replacing older, slower diplomatic channels with a judicial mechanism that typically operates within weeks rather than months.

The episode underscores a persistent challenge for European prison systems: how to contain inmates whose sentences run for decades and whose motivation to remain free is correspondingly long. A man with nineteen years still to serve on paper has a very different calculus from a prisoner nearing release, and the repeated failures of Italian and Belgian facilities to hold him — across four separate institutions over sixteen years — have prompted periodic calls in Italian parliamentary debate for tighter perimeter controls and more frequent cell inspections at high-security sites.

For now, the “escape wizard” is locked in a Spanish cell, awaiting the paperwork that will return him to an Italian prison. Whether his next attempt to leave will involve steel, sheets, or a human tower remains, for the time being, a question for the correctional services of the Republic of Italy.