A serial rapist escaped from a Tel Aviv court on Friday morning, forcing police to launch a large-scale search operation to try to arrest him.
Benny Sela is serving a 35-year sentence for 14 rape and sexual assault offenses he committed in Tel Aviv.
Sela and another inmate were escorted by police officers from the Nitzan jail to Tel Aviv for court hearings. He apparently managed to escape handcuffed when the convoy stopped on Weizman St. to drop his inmate at the Tel Aviv Magistrates' Court.
Hours after his escape, police received a call from a female bystander who said she had spotted him taking off the trousers of his jail uniform and running on a major street near Rabin Square in the city. Sela was apparently wearing a pair of jeans under his uniform, strengthening suspicions that he had planned the escape.
"I called 100, and told police that I can see him. I ran after him and tried to catch him. He carried on straight to a parking lot between two buildings," Rehava Yosfi, a Tel Aviv Municipality who was the last person to see Sela, told Ynet.
He was due to appear before the Labor Court on Shocken St, police said initially, but it later appeared that the Labor court has its doors closed on Friday which created a rift between police and the Israel Prison Service over the incident.
Police chief Moshe Karadi appointed a committee to probe the circumstances of his escape but Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter overturned the decision saying he will appoint a retired police commander to investigate the incident.
Police want to know why the Prison Service transported Sela out of prison to the court on a day when no hearings are held.
Dichter summoned Karadi for talks over the mishap.
In 2000 Sela was sentenced to the toughest sentence ever handed down on a rapist in Israel.
Police blunder
Police admitted Friday that the escape was a serious failure.
Retired deputy police commissioner Menachem Frank, who oversaw the arrest of Sela during his tenure as the commander of the central unit in the Tel Aviv District told Ynet: "I am shocked. I was the commander of the operation and it was the operation – the largest of its time. It took us almost ten months until we arrested him."
Asked if this is in fact a blunder he said: "I don't understand how this happened. I believe they will check how it happened, and will reach the appropriate conclusions. What is important now is to arrest him and I believe he will be arrested. In the first place, he will go underground … But the minute he starts moving, intelligence will bring him to us. We need to act with level-headedness."
Former Tel Aviv District chief Yossi Sadvon, told Ynet that the escape was a police "blunder."
Sadvon said he is convinced that Sela will be arrested: "It happened many times in the past that criminals escaped from outside courts ... but lately escapes have been limited through security and police escorting, but there is no doubt this is a blunder."
First published: 11:13, 11.24.6