Copter Plucks Convict Off Prison Roof in Paris

A woman pilot maneuvered a rented helicopter over the roof of a prison here Monday and carried away a convict who had been hiding from guards behind a chimney.

Police identified the prisoner as Michel Vaujour, 34, who has been jailed 10 times since he was 17 on increasingly serious charges. Vaujour, a veteran of three previous jailbreaks, was serving 18 years for armed robbery.

The white helicopter flew low over central Paris, ignoring radio warnings that it was below the legal altitude limit, and hovered over a roof of the La Sante prison in the southern part of the capital.

A man armed with a submachine gun slid down a line from the aircraft to the roof. Vaujour, wearing a red sweater and jeans, grabbed a landing skid and clambered aboard with the gunman following. The men were hidden from guards behind the large chimney.

A second prisoner on the roof, identified by police as Pierre Hernandez, 28, later said he decided at the last moment not to try to board the helicopter and gave himself up when guards and police reached the roof. It was not clear how he and Vaujour had managed to elude the guards and clamber to the roof.

Landed in Soccer Field

The woman set the helicopter down in a soccer field near the prison and disappeared with the two men. Police used trained dogs to check out the aircraft, fearing it might be booby-trapped with explosives.

Two men escaped from another jail in the Paris area in a similar manner five years ago, plucked from the sports field inside the walls by gunmen who forced the pilot of a chartered helicopter to do their bidding.

Vaujour was convicted March 8, 1985, of a 1981 bank robbery and the attempted murder of a policeman who was shot in the leg in 1980 while Vaujour was last on the run.

Hernandez, who decided to stay behind, is awaiting trial for armed robbery.

Claude Roumet, 47, owner of the rental company, said the woman was about 30, called herself Lena Rigon and had taken out the same helicopter several times over the last five or six months. He described her as a “pretty little woman, the sportswoman type.”

False Identity

Roumet said police told him the identity was false. He said the woman had a valid helicopter pilot’s license and had been checked out on a dual-control craft when she first asked to rent the Alouette 2 used in the escape.

“There was no problem” with her flying and she rented the same helicopter about every two weeks, sometimes alone and sometimes with one or two passengers, he said.

She always paid in cash at a rate of 2,200 francs (about $315) an hour, according to Roumet.

He said she rented the Alouette 2 Monday morning for “a one-hour local flight” with a passenger to whom Roumet did not pay particular attention, apart from noticing that he was carrying a sports bag. The bag apparently concealed the submachine gun.

Vaujour’s last escape was from the courthouse in the eastern town of Chalons-sur-Marne in 1979, when he took an investigating magistrate as a temporary hostage. He was caught two years later.

He escaped from the prison at Chalons-sur-Marne in 1975 and from another in Macon in southeastern France in 1973 by scaling walls.